[hnbad]

Hi. If the protocol is open, the software is free and the main instance openly federates with self-hosters, what's the monetization strategy here? Clearly it's not "harvest all the data and figure it out later" as that avenue seems to be shut down internationally by strengthened privacy laws and ads don't work well with federation and third party clients. Is "grow first, figure out how to make money later" still a viable strategy in this economy?

[riffic]

managed hosting perhaps? It works in the email industry at least (Google and Microsoft nearly dominate the email biz)

[hnbad]

Yeah but that assumes ATP reaches anything even remotely approximating the ubiquity of email rather than ending up like Google Wave (not literally by being handed off to Apache - which took Wave behind the barn in 2018 in case you're wondering what happened to it).