A new platform like Lemmy needs to establish trust and reliability for a certain time period before it can expect people to give back something. Something that the Sync developer has established already for a decade now.

Assuming that Lemmy continues to flourish well, I will be perfectly happy to donate to Lemmy, in fact I’m quite sure that in the long run I’ll donate a lot more to Lemmy than the one time purchase cost of Sync.

I am not sure but possibly the HTML5 features such as the video tag are sufficient to let the browser offer basic media playback capabilities without requiring JS.

True, and yet a blockchain has the seemingly paradoxical nature of being decentralized as well as universal (presuming everyone uses the same blockchain of course). But it’s still decentralized in that no one company or entity controls all of it.