[brightlancer]

> The gratis web is fading to nothing. Everyone wants something. None of it is truly free. The fediverse instances will run as long as they get donations, but charities are subject to a tragedy of the commons. They will eventually close up registrations if enough humans join for the parasite bots to follow them.

You blame "everyone wants something" but it's more clear in your last sentence: abuse by unverified users.

Lots of folks will provide services for free (actually free, no data collection etc.) but very few folks have the disposable income to _pay_ for someone to handle abuse.

So folks who provide popular services long-term have to find some way to pay for it. OMG, imagine that.

With the caveat that cryptocurrencies are usually rubbish, cryptocurrencies have allowed folks to anonymously pay for anonymous access to services. This won't work for most mainstream services (in large part because of government opposition), but it's an option. At some point which I hope to live to see, we'll go back to the old days of anonymously paying for anonymous access. (Cash was awesome.)

[Ajedi32]

And to make that a bit more concrete, ProtonMail accepts Bitcoin and will let you create a truly anonymous account if you pay for their premium plan via that method.

Though to be fair it's actually pretty hard to obtain Bitcoin anonymously. Monero would be better. And this doesn't really solve the phone number problem.