His patreons are either live in an area where there is no Internet
The fact that he got on a Dutch network is due to longstanding connections there. His friend Patrick Haeck is from Belgium and I know he had several meetups there in the early days with Dutch and German exJWs also making the trip.
A couple of years ago he made a video about the Polish exodus and went there to film one of his documentary length films. If you ever want to suffer through a livestream of his, you’ll notice that he gets a lot of his superchat donations in Euro and Polish zloty. He really isn’t popular in the UK anymore, but he has retained some measure of it in Europe.
Lloyd pulling in donations from Polish former JWs who are undoubtedly on the lower end of the median salary there is highly exploitative. It’s not because his content is second to none, but rather he’s the only activist with the time and money to make the trip to Poland and engage with the locals. Instead of providing support and simply enjoying the association and hospitality of his hosts, he makes it into a fundraising trip. Due to the language barrier and the fact that many only get their information through him as he had intended, this Thailand scandal gets lost on many of them and they take his word that it’s pure defamation.
Again - taking advantage of vulnerable people who probably couldn’t afford a week’s stay in Budapest. BTW - Hungary is a sex trafficking hotspot and Lloyd has never said he was giving up sex workers. It’s not the first, second or third time I’ve heard him going on hols there.
is it me or does he come across as “doing everyone a favour” by taking time out of his vacation to “speak on behalf of the community”
I came to the same conclusion as you did. He pulled the same shit back when he was on this forum. Lloyd would announce that him and his wife would be going on holiday in case anyone was wondering where he went as if this place couldn’t function a week without him. Once he even appointed someone as a proxy for him in his absence.
He really does believe that he still runs the show and everyone should wait until he gets back for the real coverage to begin. His video conducted on the street in Budapest about the Hamburg killings was one of platitudes and general remarks. It was basically “killing is bad, don’t do it, we can fight WT by exposing their doctrine, this is horrible news…”. Really just a placeholder until he can make the definitive video about the tragedy, even though he’s privy to the same information as everyone else.