For potentially large communities or a large enough group of related small communities, it can be. A core of people could spin up their own server off their own back and/or through donations. Communities exist this way outside of reddit already, this would just be a way to tap into a common interface and interoperability that federation provides. Or is there some centralised thing that means that no matter what someone might impose restrictions?

But not video and maybe limited images to keep costs in check. Maybe video hosting through unlisted youtube videos if that doesn’t get curbed.

What is keeping prices high now is particularly nvidia but also amd transitioning more to an AI/ML pro/server/datacentre market, consumer GPU’s are not a big let alone majority of the pie. They’re simply not making enough consumer cards and don’t care that very little cards are sold because they’re getting ludicrous prices on what does sell. intel gen 2 needs to be good in the mid range to provide competition again, the problem is a distinct lack of competition.

If you use btrfs with dedupe it’s much less inefficient than ext4.