I’m fairly new and don’t 100% understand it yet, but instances are run on servers that require money. Are we heading towards seeing ads or subscriptions to raise funds instead of relying on donations to cover overhead?
Especially with the influx of new users. Hardware upgrades are needed.
I could see both ads and subscriptions work (although, the former might be “useless” for those using adblockers, after all, so I’d see persistent/static sponsorship ads similar to how some FOSS projects do it to be more likely).
Especially the latter, for certain services that focus on providing value. A friend of mine mentioned Misskey for example, apparently being used by some Japanese artists. Considering Twitter’s on its way out by being harmful to commission artists, I could see someone spin up such instance and ask X amount for providing a marketplace for commissioned goods.
I’d be happy to pay like $5/mo for a subscription to a stable, ad-free, and appropriately provisioned instance so I can use a third-party app that doesn’t try to harvest all the data it can off my mobile. If reddit offered API access with premium to be cash flow positive I would have had no issues with that.
That said, I’m glad they didn’t. Fedeverse feels more like the way it should be!