We will need small and independent commercial providers for the Fediverse.
It’s a valid point. We can’t expect to be free of corporations and also expect people to maintain servers for free. Running a service costs someone somewhere, and running a massive service can’t easily work relying on just donations. I’d be happy to pay a small monthly/yearly fee to a nonprofit to guarantee an independent server, rather than to be a product to be traded.
Why can’t it rely on donations? People poo-poo this, but I’ve yet to hear a substantive reason as to why.
Show me any donation-based instance on Mastodon that is able to pay (market-rate) for the labor of the moderators, admins and developers.
Is that an apples-to-apples comparison though? To me, that sounds like “Show me a soup kitchen that’s able to pay market rate for chefs”.
Also, by that logic, Reddit is a failure. They don’t pay mods either.
