I can’t find any working mastodon instances for porn except adult.18plus.social but i need to pay a fee.. i̵ ̵n̵e̵e̵d̵ ̵f̵r̵e̵e̵ ̵o̵n̵e̵s̵.̵. (EDITED: SORRY)
Actually there used to be Sinblr, Humblr, and others.. but they all shut down for some weird reason I don’t understand.. WHAT HAPPENED?
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.
It's also the only real good method of KYC for when the feds come knocking on your door asking why you're letting people who are posting pictures of minors onto your service, and asking-but-not-really who they are.
I love the fediverse, but there are a ton of whiny entitled people here who don't understand that regular people are hosting these things with their own money and time. I do host my own Lemmy instance, and it's been one of the most stressful things in my life. I never thought I'd have to register with the federal government as a mandatory CSAM reporter but here I fucking am. Then they go around and say "I need free ones". The fuck you do. If you need free porn and shit go host it yourself, you can have your house raided by the feds for hosting stuff that isn't okay.
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.
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.
From a user's perspective, yes, but as an instance admin that's also a DMCA nightmare.
That's a great example of the eternal fight between mods and users that ultimately drives admins away: users feel entitled to post that stuff, and mods have to take it down. The user is anonymous and possibly from a country with very lax laws, so they're protected. The admins have to pay for the servers with real money and their real identity, and thus also an easy target for lawyers.