Of course. I have nothing against Fediverse server admins setting up a Patreon —ideally Liberapay— or something similar to receive donations to cover running costs. I have and continue to contribute financially to indie devs or server admins when I can.
Not everyone will do that of course. But there again, running stuff at a small scale shouldn’t be crazy expensive either. The operational costs of keeping a microblog or indie site running are little to none. I host my blog and all of my side projects for free in a cloud provider.
Running a Fediverse server is more expensive. Last time I looked into what it would roughly cost to stand up a barebones stack to host a Mastodon server in a public cloud, it was like a hundred bucks a month. Not cheap but it may be big enough to house a couple thousand users. If at least 0.5% of your userbase donated some money to cover running costs, you might be ok.
Alternatively, if you have a server lying around at home, loads of people self-host at home, which is a tad cheaper.
I’m not saying a fully decentralised indie internet wouldn’t have its shortcomings, of course. I’m just saying I’d happily take that over the current state of the web.
Of course. I have nothing against Fediverse server admins setting up a Patreon —ideally Liberapay— or something similar to receive donations to cover running costs. I have and continue to contribute financially to indie devs or server admins when I can.
Not everyone will do that of course. But there again, running stuff at a small scale shouldn’t be crazy expensive either. The operational costs of keeping a microblog or indie site running are little to none. I host my blog and all of my side projects for free in a cloud provider.
Running a Fediverse server is more expensive. Last time I looked into what it would roughly cost to stand up a barebones stack to host a Mastodon server in a public cloud, it was like a hundred bucks a month. Not cheap but it may be big enough to house a couple thousand users. If at least 0.5% of your userbase donated some money to cover running costs, you might be ok.
Alternatively, if you have a server lying around at home, loads of people self-host at home, which is a tad cheaper.
I’m not saying a fully decentralised indie internet wouldn’t have its shortcomings, of course. I’m just saying I’d happily take that over the current state of the web.