cheap ≠ free Making nice things is difficult and time-consuming.
If we want people to make nice things for us, we have to pay for their rent and grocery bills and raw materials.
If you are spending less than $1 per hour on your entertainment (podcasts, videos, articles, games, books, etc.), consider finding ways to support creators and the infrastructure that supports them.
To be honest, PWAs and static sites hosted on IPFS seems like a way forward to this. I do static sites every year for Mother’s day, because I can make cuter cards than I could buy that way, for example. Are they good? shrug idk about that, but they are more personal.
Pushing for more distributed infrastructure is the way forward to me too. Even tech giants can’t really afford to run the way they do without burning investors money and cheap loans (which having been drying up). Using things like petal.dev and hivemind.io for AI. Using IPFS for generic data storage. ActivityPub for async connections (like social media, git forges (Gitlab and Forjo moving forward here), and more!). Matrix for complex real-time p2p connections (check out thirdroom.io for one of the coolest examples of this to me). As well as WebRTC, WebTorrent which is used to good effect with peertube to create a p2p cdn!
All of this exists just as a solution to reduce the cost of running the web and distribute across the existing hardware and infrastructure that has to exist on the client-side.
In the cases where the backend HAS to be run on someone else hardware, you have volunteered, academic, and publically funded support to help offset public good support, but also things like the Ethereum virtual machine (EVM), filecoin, etc. Which attempts to provide an open market for providing some parts of the infrastructure where volunteering is possible, available or preferred. I only mention ETH because it’s not POW and at least publically influenced with its DAO. POW is, and understandably, extremely low value in our current climate.
This helps reduce the centralization and therefore inevitable enshittification of these services too.
Getting money to creators through art funds, patronage tools like LibrePay, Open Collective, etc. and even Brave’s reward systems are all good on the surface efforts to get funds to creators, but I personally prefer seeing more things to lower the labor and capital needed (and therefore cost) over just getting more to them.