If you have a look at freemium games, it’s always funded by a few whales and the majority of users just free ride. This goes against every intuition we have but is a reality in other places as well, like casinos and stuff. Centralized platforms have the means to shuffle money around very easily, while we’re here asking that every user pays a fee every month and then wonder why the thing isn’t growing. I used to think metered usage micropayments was the obvious way to go, since you could distribute content into some sort of filecoin/storj clone and everyone would just pay their fair share but now I’m leaning towards “turn free riders into CDN”. My iPhone has more processing power and bandwidth available than most servers had a few decades ago, IPv6 and NAT hole punching have been enabling p2p applications for a while now, why not? Then there would be less pressure on free relays by freeloaders and premium relays could justify subsiding free relays, while focusing on delivering value for the whales.