Mastodon.

Number of users:
13,891,828

Number of ads displayed:
0

This is the way. 🙌🏻

@randahl Definitely feels nice, but i fail to see how this can be sustainable in the long run.
@eswarm thousands of users sponsor Mastodon servers. It works.

@randahl I would love that to be the case, where its publicly funded and supported, e.g Wikipedia. But there is another side too, people don't pay(majority) if it's voluntary. Look at open source projects languishing without funding even though they have a vast amount of users.

Again, I am not saying it won't work, it's working currently. But I have my doubts on this business model especially when this scales.

@eswarm @randahl scales in which sense? If it's about resources to run the servers, then I think it's pretty important that it's Fedi, and it scales (honestly, more like "grows") horizontally. If yuge instances will start running into such constraints... eh whatever. I don't think mega-instances are too good for the platform as a whole, anyway.