There are plenty of ways where people can enter into an equity agreement without having to pay directly with money.
can take over should something happen to you
Are you trying to get rid of me? Then why are you arguing as if (a) something bad might happen to me or (b) I am somehow unable/unfit to manage this?
No matter what I do/offer/propose, you will always try to find an excuse to rationalize your unwillingness to contribute to what I am doing, like I'm failing some type of BS purity test.
Which part of "I am not asking for financial support" is not clear from the blog post?
Stop thinking in terms of prices, and start thinking in terms of value. A three-letter domain for less than 1000€ is a bargain.
To be precise, I'm willing to give up some ownership. I still want to participate in its governance.
someone else’s hardware?
If a new consortium is formed and if the collective decision is to move it, yes. If the decision is to keep as it is, also fine.
Just coordinate the release of the urls and the transfer of the instance.
This is exactly what I am offering. I want to transfer these instances to a consortium to own this collectively.
without putting any work or money into it.
Just yesterday I renewed 10 of these domains. That cost me ~400€. I renewed nba.space and nfl.community last month, each cost ~650€. Running all these instances is costing me ~200€/month.
I'm not even looking to dump these costs on the potential new co-owners, this is why I said that I don't mind keep running them.
It seems like you are waiting for the next influx to potentially monetize
First, we'd have to argue the implication. You are implying that any attempt at building anything that is financially sustainable is immoral, something that I said many times is completely misguided, and a point of view that is starting now to be shared by other prominent figures in the Fediverse.
Second, I am offering the instances to be co-owned precisely to assuage those concerns. By having other admins co-owning the instances, I'd hope that less people would be pushing those accusations against me.
aren’t going to join communities if they can’t register there.
Why?! The whole point of federation is to let people join communities even when they don't have an account in the same server.
the most active communities start off with a few people who care almost obsessively about that topic.
There are two different, orthogonal issues here:
The idea of having topic-specific instances is an attempt to mitigate issue #2.
People will leave or join based on how the admins and mods run them, whether or not the users are hosted there.
Not my experience. A few examples:
That's an argument that is:
It's amazing, there is always someone that will look at other people are doing and find the worst possible take.
I decided to reach out to other admins precisely because I got tired of hearing "you are running all these instances by yourself, who guarantees that you are not going to do something nasty with them or disappear if you lose interest?", even though I'm running all these instances by myself, keeping them up to date, posting regularly on a good number of them, trying to get more people involved for over an year and (most importantly) outliving a bunch of "community-based instances" .
Seriously, this crab mentality is the worst. What a disgrace.
"rendezvous instances" is a perfect term for them...
I am not planning to close any instances. I am not working on them based on their current activity, but I am keeping them for a scenario where a mass migration away from Reddit actually happens.
When I say admins only, that can be extended to moderators as well.
At least I don’t think we should discourage creating different places for the same topics
I'm not discouraging it. To repeat: the idea is not to push a "there can be only one" mentality, but to set up a system that can work well for the 80% of people who can be satisfied with the median case.
Sorry, I can not let go of this. I don't know if you realized that the whole reason that I am doing this is because you kept pushing this idea that you'd be more than willing to contribute to different instances and that the only thing that is stopping you is that you'd be worried about me being the only person.
Even with me telling you that I have other people to take over my operations, you were doubting me.
Now that I am actually going forward and offering to get more people onboard, while asking for NOTHING in return, you are putting this bullshit, pretending to be worried about price of domains.
What you are doing is just Concern Trolling, and I am frankly tired of this. You have put no Skin in the Game, yet you continue to find ways to rationalize your senseless idea that this is going to grow magically without getting people to put significant resources at stake.