Interesting pattern emerging, the IT time of the admins is pretty damn priceless, (thank you admins!) but when an instance gets up to scale a lot of them can end up with a hard cost of 10 cents per user per month.
The last stat I remember from Facebook was revenue per user per year was around 4 dollars. At 31b revenue and 2.7b monthly users, Youtubes average profit per user is about $10 per user per year. 100 million people pay for YT premium now.
So if every user paid $1 per month, it might not pay all the costs but the admins could get paid something and the fediverse could scale. The bigger you get though, you get economies of scale from future Fediverse data centers, but also you need really good programmers because its a huge temptation for hackers and propagandists.
I also want to say its a labor of love and a lot of work for mods too who may be non technical but the work and time they put in is important.
Its interesting that they plan to profit off of the Fediverse but they aren't paying for running instances themselves. At least they aren't now.
The only thing that is actually valuable in all this is the data generated by Fediversers themselves though, lets say 90 percent, and a nifty container around the content to make it more viewable/accessible/prettier, 10 percent.
They want to make profit off of memberships and probably ads, off of Fediversers content, and then they can leverage and monetize their new "social network" by some astronomical valuation in the market.
Good playbook, its been done many times now by Reddit, linkedin, Facebook, and all the rest, and maybe they will pull it off, but after more than 10 years of Social Media abuses, the Fediverse is filled with people who no longer want to be exploited in this way anymore. How about just paying for some instances, or supporting some FOSS projects already in the works?
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"And in his business expense reports, as prescribed by law, was the leasing of and proper payments for intellectual property and patent leasing, which went through the proper banks of Murkwood and other financial centers, unfortunately leaving 0 taxable income."
But Lord Sauron has been 100 percent transparent, you can trust him.
Lord Sauron is appealing "This shortsighted decision from a corrupt partisan commission" and announces a countersuit alleging theft and demanding return of certain items of his personal property that were taken from his office under the new business anti espionage laws.
These include apparently a shirt of mail and some unnamed pieces of jewelry.
The crumbs that fell to the floor.