rglullis

That would be nice, but the cost of hosting is not the issue. The problem is that people expect to have free software being developed and services being offered but they don't want to pay for the labor of developers and admins.

Thanks for making it clear that you are evading giving your straightforward opinion for the following statements:

• Free Software Developers deserve to be paid for their work, regardless of the "price tag" or license fees.
• People working in free software should treat their craft as a hobby.
• The work of system administrators (setting up the systems, ensuring it is secure, managing backups, keeping it up to date, implementing improvements, etc) is valuable and should be properly compensated.
• If someone is offering to run and manage a server without asking a priori for any form of payment, then this means that all their work is altruistic and they should not be compensated for it.
• One Individual using a platform and actively promoting it is as important as one developer of the platform.
• One individual using a platform and actively promoting it is as important as the admin of one server running the platform.
• If there were no "volunteer run" instances, I would run my own and bear all the costs to operate it.
• People that are still using the traditional social media networks should know better. If they haven't left yet, they deserve everything bad that happens to them there.
• It's perfectly acceptable and ethical for any company that provides an utility (water, heating, electricity, phone, internet) to expect a profit.
• It's perfectly acceptable and ethical for a indie game developer to charge a monthly fee from the users while they are working on it.
• In a world where the big social media companies (Reddit, Twitter, Facebook) were provably serving the interests of the users and not its investors (no data exploitation, no promotion of corporate agenda, using and promoting open standards for interoperation, no forced walled garden and artificial scarcity) and changed their business model to a simple monthly subscription fee, I would still not use them.
• In a world where the big social media companies were provably serving the interests of the users and not its investors, I would only use it if I did not have to pay and they relied on other forms of revenue to run their service, e.g, non-invasive advertisements.

No, thanks. I will not engage in any further discussion with you until you explicitly answer those statements.

Please start with the yes or no, the nuances can come after you plainly state your opinion about how much the work of admins is valuable to you.

I specifically said "you can just say agree or disagree", so please don't come with that "It would take too much time".

The list of statements where you have the chance to share your values is still unanswered.

Phrased another way: "I don't think you are allowed to make a living out of the work you do here, so thank you for accepting all this for free".

All the crypto stuff is opt-in.

No, federation is a lot easier than setting up an email server and 500GB of media storage should be enough for a long time for Lemmy. For the microblogging side, it will depend on how many media-heavy people you follow. If you follow hundreds of photographers, you will need to clear your remote media every once in a while.

You don't have to host your instance if that is your concern, but if you factor everything the total cost of running an instance (getting your own PC/VPS plus disks/storage for media, plus electricity if you are running at home) will be around $150/year. You can of course get together with some of your friends and split those costs.

But if all you want is to ensure that the Fediverse is healthy and that you don't need to worry about anything, there are commercial service providers who run servers only for paying customers. These are still cheap, $20-30 per year.

Or we could drop the whole idea of depending on "donations" and understand that admins are professionals who would like to make a living like everyone else?

You are the exception, and you will find out that even the most prolific participants here claiming that $5 per year is enough to cover the hardware costs, so he doesn't see any reason to give more than that.