Say a competent & committed person launched a premium instance. #Calckey, let’s say, but it could be any #Fediverse flavor.
By premium I mean that it would require all accounts to pay $15/month.
Further assume that 100 people would sign up for that. (For the record; I would totally sign up for that.)
That’s $1500/month. Not a living wage, but possibly enough to make it worth their while to do all the backend shit people like me cannot do, which likely is not anywhere near a full-time job.
I know the devil is in the details, but on broad strokes… why wouldn’t this work?
@Evoterra I want this to work. But I'm struggling to think of a compelling offering to differentiate my premium instance from the free ones. Better moderation, maybe, but that's labor intensive and soul-crushing. What else?
I can think of one potential benefit of a paying-members-only instance: trolls cannot create a bunch of accounts on your instance, because each account would need to pay your fee. Problem is, you then need to kick and block trolls after they paid for a service that you are no longer providing. Your terms of service need to be abundantly clear and airtight to protect from litigation.
@kainoa@Evoterra I'd say what they proposed is possible but they'd need to use something like Calckey that is extensible and actually have a suite of customizations that made it worthwhile to pay the fees for.
@kainoa True. But all servers are not created equal. And the other people on a server are at least part of the draw.
People join topic-specific instances. What if this instances “purpose” is to give members better reliability, some say in policies, etc?
I mean, I could pay $15 a month for a managed hosting service to run it for me. Spending the same to get a more personal touch and a voice seems… intriguing.
@Evoterra@kainoa I read someone say that a premium subscription model would probably be philosophically anathema to many server owners and that someone trying that would get defederated. No idea if that's true though. Seems like a decent funding model
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