on my private tracker you get points for just always seeding, you can turn those points in for ratios boosts at a pretty good rate.

Yeah it’s the issue with this ‘middle ground’ of federation. some ideal world would be fully p2p, identities fundamentally would rest with the user’s device or backed up somewhere public and encrypted, then servers just become meeting hubs or caches of content. there’s some protocols that already do this at a technical level, secure scuttlebutt and nostr are two. there’s other issues that crop up, for one moderation and content discovery starts to be a lot more complicated.

so, not a solved problem by any means, but federation at least gives us a bit more freedom than a singular centralized service.