Paywalling a better resolution than the ones ALREADY present on the platform, may be the best way to approach the issue of it being fucking expensive to serve it.
Youtube has gone to shit and the enhanced 1080p bitrate is not one of the reasons
Along with the premium version, they have a crypto currency (TON) that can be used to buy things on the platform from other users, and I think you can also buy things with real money and they keep a small commission. Also there are some small ads in very large channels (not groups, channels only) and ways to gift “stars” to other people, like Patreon or sth
The encryption is not Trust me bro. It is public and tested multiple times. For example an analysis back in 2021:
It found somes issues in the implementation of MTProto 2.0 from the official apps, with only one of them being actually usable as an attack vector, and they were all fixed before the disclosure of the analysis. They found no issues with the encryption algorithm other than some choices that may make the implementation of it harder
Not great, but “it’s working” at least
While I love traditional forum structure, I don’t think it would be great to transition later from one structure to another completely different. In my mind, the only thing that needs a bit of tuning is the “Hot” algorithm of the front page