[sellingwebsite]

Do you seriously believe in that? You have to be trolling.

"be free" is how we ended up with a dragnet surveillance that is plaguing the web. Who is going to pay for the storage and the bandwidth?

If you want it to "be free", you are free to host it on your own hardware.

> There used to be sites that passed all of these

> Sadly, I haven't seen one in many years.

Of course you won't see one: they're all dead or dying a slow death. Free is unsustainable.

[pmoriarty]

It is sustainable.

Take a look at Wikipedia, archive.org, libraries, blogs, mailing lists, usenet, IRC, a huge variety of websites offering free tools, etc. The list goes on and on.

None of them need work on a surveillance model either. To participate in or contribute to surveillance is a personal choice, not something forced upon you when you make a service available to the internet for free.

[aeorgnoieang]

Wikipedia and archive.org are supported by donations. That is possible for an image hosting site/service.

"blogs, mailing lists, usenet, IRC" are all paid by someone and all tho their are free hosts for them (or similar services), a lot of people are perfectly fine paying for them and otherwise seem mostly content "to participate in or contribute to surveillance". I'm fine with that too.

But it's very much always been "the way the Internet used to be" to pay for things you value sufficiently. Someone has always paid for everything and gift economies are inherently limited. They're also much harder now than when the Internet was younger.

Academia also seems like a poor example of 'the gift economy spirit'. They're struggling to live up to that spirit badly enough that it's disingenuous to suggest it as something to emulate.