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 think the best solution to this whole monetization issue is to just make sharing bandwidth as easy as possible on the fediverse.
If hosting can be done by everyone using an instance, no one entity has to bear overwhelming costs, so there’s no excuse to demand money.
That’s an interesting idea - have a special tier on one or more cloud providers paid for out of that source, or even a flat payment to any server provider based on number of users/activity or something like that?