rglullis

And for the record, I contributed to Pixelfed and Mastodon development (hundreds of euros per year) out of my own pocket regardless of Communick. I do it not because I have to, but because I believe that developers of free projects should be valued by their efforts and that the only way we can get rid of ad-based, predatory social media platforms is by putting our money where our mouths are.

You are still not answering the question!

Forget about Communick or my offer specifically: I am asking if you think that there is any value in paying for a service based on open standards.

I am not asking what you think of my pricing (though if your excuse is that $29 for the bundle is too much, you could say say what price point would interest you)

I am not asking you to compare the business of charging for a service (hosting) vs a product (client apps).

I am not asking you to pay for everything that is free (Linux developers are mostly employed by profit-driven companies who use Linux as a way to commoditize their complements). I am asking you whether you see the value of supporting the work of developers yourself instead of couching under the "community effort" excuse.

I am asking you to reveal your preferences and so far all I am seeing is you making an extraordinary effort to avoid saying "I refuse to pay for something that is not mandatory, even if my support could be beneficial to everyone"

You have a lengthy comment indeed, but it does not mean that you are answering the question I made: do you think that the Fediverse can be "successful" only via "pure" communal efforts, or do you think that it needs professionals to work on it and who should be properly appraised - ii.e, be paid according to market rate?

I was being sarcastic. Last week there was a big thread here were most admins people were equating "support the Fediverse" with "pay for the costs of hardware".

Wait, I thought that running a social media server costs only a few cents per user? The Lemmy crowd told me so!

What is your idea of "a lot of work"? Because I am perfectly happy with my $19/year service from migadu.com.

What type of products? There is !buyitforlife@slrpnk.net, and if you are looking for consumer electronics there is !hardware@hardware.watch

This is not answering my question, or we have different ideas of what it means to dominate.

80% of email traffic is either Gmail or Outlook, yet none of Big Tech is able to control it fully. They can not force you to use their email server, and smaller providers still exist and are actually healthy business.

Is it hard to run an email by yourself? Yes. Is it impossible? Absolutely not. To me, that is what matters.

How would that happen? If the core idea of "the Fediverse" is to have a loosely-connected network of servers and applications speaking a common protocol, how is it that they would use to "dominate" it?

I am not saying that Big Tech couldn't try to use it "open wash" their solutions, like Facebook and Google did with XMPP before. But what I am saying is that (like XMPP) I think it's virtually impossible for them to "dominate" something that is open.

I'm also not saying that the software we have is ready for the masses (it isn't) but all the issues I see are just a matter of implementation, not a fundamental design flaw.

If not completely destroy it, at least make it irrelevant for those who want to avoid it.

The FOSS movement never destroyed Microsoft, but it arguably made it possible for us to live in a world where Bill Gates owned every PC software that we run.

The question you are evading is simple: is your vision for the Fediverse something where everyone will be only working altruistically and that we should serve users who are purely out of a sense of community/charity (the soup kitchen model) or do you think there is value in paying professionals their market rate in order to get a service with better support, integrate new features and will have a vested interest in providing a superior experience (the "people go to restaurants and pay more than the cost of the food" model)?

Discouraged, but still supported. There is also another FEP (forgot the code now) being worked on and implemented by Mitra.

The point is that it is possible for an instance to federate an activity which is not originated by them.