[PaulHoule]

These financing issues are part of the nonsuperiority story of the Fediverse relative to other platforms. A cost of roughly a dollar a year per user is par for the course for online systems but Pixelfed is the opposite of Mozilla [1]. When I worked at arXiv in the early 2000s we had an honest coat structure per paper three orders of magnitude less than conventional journals but we still weren’t sustainable since we were a tiny unit in an large academic library that couldn’t get it that we were responsible for at least 90% of the value the library generated.

Any actual solution to the current problems (e.g. how could community organizations, say a board game club, organize without Facebook?) has to solve the money problem first, the technical problems. Despite the cult of the start-up, starting up is easy and can be done on a shoestring and unpaid labor, it’s the sustaining that is hard —- and the people who are capable of running on a shoestring are at the mercy of Mozilla-esque vultures whose core competence is fundraising.

[1] based anywhere but San Francisco, understaffed, probably one unpaid or underpaid staff member, no administrative overhead because no administration, heck it probably costs about $500k a year to be elligible for and able to get grants