Thank you for taking the time to give a thorough reply. Some thoughts:
Go.cam is an interesting idea, although I'm still skeptical:
1. That it performs as described
2. That people will be willing to provide said information, regardless of what the code actually does and
3. That it will satisfy the patchwork of state requirements in the US.
Still, it does sound like the least bad way of doing this I've seen so far, so fair enough. I'll keep an eye on it. The fact that it is a lightweight and cost-free solution is also extremely useful if it turns out to be acceptable.
I'm glad the Discovery Hub has been given a considerable amount of thought, as evidenced by the amount of detail you're able to give. That said, my core criticism remains: having multiple federated instances can't help but fragment the community, just like Mastodon. There are Mastodon instances that do alright for themselves, largely because they're run as extensions of other, larger services, in the way web pages used to have oldschool forums back in the day. But those are each little isolated worlds unto themselves. In general having multiple instances creates distracting competition and dilutes an already fairly small audience across multiple sites. If it's like bluesky, hey, great, but the weird little fiefdom design of bluesky a. did nothing to prevent centralized control in the end and b. did a lot to confuse and frustrate users. Kind of the worst of both worlds.
Using the Hub as an obfuscation layer for payment processing doesn't really do much either. Fundamentally, it's still on the users to figure out payment processing. Now, if payment isn't in your scope and you primarily just want to create a somewhat centralized discovery and hosting platform, fair enough. But there doesn't seem to be a good reason to do some kind of payment passthrough on your end, as far as I can tell. You aren't going to bamboozle Payment Processors.
As for Discord, I'll have to politely decline. Discord servers are not, to my knowledge, searchable, certainly not from google (and attempts to make them so have been fiercely shut down). Your server could get hacked tomorrow, and then all the discussion there will be lost forever, and rendered useless for purposes of future reference. In contrast, unless Itch shutters or bans you, this discussion will remain easily linkable, searchable and reference-able. The modern internet is far too ephemeral, even for an electronic communication network. There are forums from two decades ago, long put into archive mode, that are still yielding useful information to people today. I don't want to contribute to linkrot.
All that said, I hope you're successful in providing a useful service in the end, at least to some people. I'm just not sure I see it fitting in to what I need, or most creators that I know need. But at the very least, now more than ever, we need to be sharing information on the inner workings of this stuff as we work to stay alive and functioning. I'll definitely keep an eye on Go.cam for example.
Best of luck, and I'll keep an eye out for the project as things progress.