Worth addressing this reply because as the Fediverse grows, some people who join care nothing for decentralization and will seek to re-centralize:
1. The problem isn't that people are unwilling to pay cash, because they are. Examples: Netflix, self-hosted WordPress sites
2. Few for-profit services can handle the strain from millions of people desperate to register
3. If you were paying attention you'd see that people were donating to Mastodon, and donations substantially increased.
The business reality isn't that people are unwilling to pay. They clearly are.
It's that they're suddenly being thrust to use a service they don't understand -- and they've been trained for decades on a surveillance capitalist paradigm for social media, having problems with something that works differently.
But differing paradigms can be learned and even embraced.
Just look at Wikipedia. It does not use a surveillance capitalist model.
The other reality: people will -- and currently do -- pay for using the Fediverse.
As I've pointed out elsewhere, here's where it's currently being monetized:
1. Donations
2. Hosting
3. Support
4. Consulting
5. Customizing
We don't need to go the "let's put up ads bolstered by metrics proven by spying on people."
That's been done. It was awful. Let's never ever do that again.
@atomicpoet it will of course depend on the trust you have on the plataform/instance and if it's worth for you. I also think that even if only part of the users pay it can probably be a sustainable platform.
I for one rarely interacted on Twitter and that is not the case here, so I value much more this platform then the "other".
