rglullis

In terms of costs, the predominant factor is storage, which does not go away and is ever increasing. But anyway the problem of instances with thousands of users is not the cost of hardware, but the labor involved with moderation, security, support...

Seems so simple that somebody would have tried it already

Today you are one of the lucky 10 thousand: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net

cost of running a popular site.

I know for a fact that I can run an instance with 15k users and if each one paid $10/year I could make enough to make a living, hire someone to help with moderation and would let me have time to contribute back to the codebase and work on more fediverse projects.

The beauty of this is that I don't need to have a "huge" site or a monopoly in the market. Other developers could do something similar, due to federation there could be space even for collaboration and/or expansion into other segments.

All we need is to get more people to understand that paying $10/year for something they used to have "for free" is a lot better than having your data exploited.

I am not talking about the media giants, existing or yet to exist. I am talking about someone providing access to a subscriber-only Lemmy or Mastodon instance, that could be well federated, and professionally managed and moderated.

it would exclude all the interesting people

Are all "interesting people" so cash strapped that they wouldn't be able to afford a $10/year membership?

Anyway, what if I told you that my instance provides "group-based" billing? You could, e.g, get a 10-account package for $5/month and give access to 9 other people there.

I would still try to come up with some form of vouch or sponsorship-based system, where the paying members get to approve non-paying members if they have a backing sponsor.

donate to keep a door open for all.

Donation-based instances are not sustainable. You can see that already with Mastodon. They used to be able to get enough funds to even support upstream projects, now they are invite-only. Turns out that "keeping the door open for all" makes the operating costs rise faster than the revenue from donations.

To be 100% honest, I think that those that have a very specific server in mind would be better off by running their own instance, which I also do on Communick but still need to add Firefish to the list.

For the "basic" access, what I'd like to have is only one "single" instance that can "speak" Activity Pub, and then just serve different frontends that can provide the different functionality. This would IMNSHO make more sense because then people could have one single account regardless if they want to do microblogging, share pictures or talk on a forum like Lemmy.

Please explain? I'm not saying that what you are doing is a bad idea, I'm just saying that you might enjoy the process of self-hosting but the majority of people simply just want a worry-free solution.

tiny annual subscription fee.

I'm not hosting Firefish (yet), but I do have $10/year plans for Lemmy and Mastodon. Is that within your idea of "tiny fee"?

This way, you end up paying a lot more than the cost of an yearly subscription, and I am not just saying that because of the cost to rent the server or the electricity to run one at home. It's the cost of your time as well doing admin duties that can be seen as a hobby for you but for most people is just another unpaid job that they'd rather outsource.

I understand the sentiment, but I can't stop feeling that it is too self-centered. I certainly agree that we do not need a billion people on the Fediverse, but at the same time I feel some moral imperative to free the billion people that are stuck on Big Tech networks, and we need to build an alternative for them.

In my dream world, every basketball or football team (american or the real one) would have its own Mastodon/Peertube instance and fans would sign up to a monthly subscription which would give them exclusive benefits, guaranteed prices for tickets (to kill the secondary market) and maybe even voting rights for larger decisions.

In my crazy dream world, sport teams would cut the middlemen and stop selling broadcast rights and broadcast everything direct to viewer. The tech already lets us have that, it's just that the whole thing is already quite profitable for the top execs so they don't really care about making it more accessible.

Well, the discussion was about Twitter charging a subscription so I thought that was implied.

You are right though that having a system where simply paying to signup would already help alleviate some of the problems with spammers and bots.

Why? This is not a one-off cost. You wouldn't be paying for a product that you bought once and can be used indefinitely. Software needs to be maintained, data needs to be stored, bits need to transported, mods need to be paid for their ongoing work, etc.

Mind you, I am not talking about price levels of a Netflix or Twitter Blue subscription. I am talking about a much lower price point. $10/year would be more than enough for me to make hosting a large instance a sustainable venture, which would even let me keep my pledge of giving 20% of the profits to the development teams of the upstream projects.