this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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Hmm. Theoretically you could commercialise an instance, I guess.
I expect that in time, that's exactly what will happen. Some instance somewhere will offer guaranteed availability and performance for a monthly fee to it's members. That feels icky at first blush, but why should it? It's not everyone's cup of tea, but no one is forced to use that instance to be part of the larger community, and one instance can't hold the community hostage like a single company social media company could. They'll have success right up until they don't and the Fediverse will sort it out through migrations of users and communities.
or make a non-profit. archiveofourown have ~20% of reddit's traffic and run purely on donation.
That might work too, but I feel like it could be tricky to fundraise if there's 1000 equivalent large-ish instances.
You'd have to have a hook - guaranteed performance or uptime. Maybe some niche feature set or enhancement.
I think it's similar to some of the other open source vendors out there that sell a service that they host, but do not actually own (even if they are one of the open source project contributors). You can't get too greedy because the thing you sell can be sold by anyone, so you have to compete on price and "extras". Not the easiest way to make money, but it's not unheard of.