Fediverse

Let's see if we can put the context clues together.

All of the free ones were shut down. Only the paid one survived.

Well, I can only assume, but since fediverse services are hosted by real humans and not corporations, I'm going to go out on a limb and say they couldn't afford to stay afloat.

Another alternative is that requiring payment is a simple way to ensure that the people using your service are also 18+, since it requires a sign in form, acknowledgement, and then credit card. That helps when the feds come knocking on your door asking why you're letting minors into your service.

Porn is often really high traffic, which is expensive to run. But a lot of people are weirdos too and tend to push it to the border of legality, which can be challenging for admins if your users keep posting lolis even if it's not allowed. And they'll scream at you "it's not technically illegal".

The other thing people do a lot with porn is post stuff from sketchy sources or repost paid content for free stealing from OnlyFans pages and the big porn studios. And lately, AI generated porn of non-consenting celebrities. And of course now the increasing pressure to make sure to keep minors out or heaven forbid they're shown trans porn.

It's expensive to store all that porn, it's insanely expensive to distribute it, you need lawyers on standby for the firehose of DMCA reports, you need a solid team of moderators scrubbing the site as fast as possible for CSAM, or run AI tools that needs a lot of fast hardware to run at any decent speed (you need to analyze every frame of a video, for example).

It's just expensive as fuck overall and that's why a lot of the porn sites have the sketchiest ads ever, and that's because you can't run regular ads as most advertisers don't want to be shown next to questionable content.

On the fediverse you have the added challenge that ideally, you scrub things before they get federated due to federation bugs. Or you risk being defederated which you probably will anyway as most admins just don't want to deal with it.

i need free ones

i need free ones

That's a Nostr relay, nothing to do with the Fediverse.

Run your own.

Moons OP

That doin' anything for ya?