I prefer good faith discussions please. I love the Fediverse and love what it can be long term. The problem is that parts of the culture want nothing to do with financial aspect. Many are opposed to ads, memberships, sponsorships etc The “small instances” response does nothing to positively contribute to the conversation. There are already massive instances and not everyone wants to self host. People are concerned with larger companies coming to the Fedi but these beliefs will drive everyday users to those instances. People don’t like feeling disposable and when you hamstring admins who then ultimately shut down their instances that’s exactly how people end up feeling. There has to be an ethical way of going about this. So many people were too hard just to be told “too bad” “small instances” I don’t want to end up with a Fediverse ran by corporations because they can provide stability.
You said you want good faith discussions, but you preemptively dismissed one of the biggest answers because you don’t think it’s a good solution. Then you have people here disagreeing with you, explaining why, and pointing to examples of it being done successfully, and you continue to completely dismiss a donation as nothing more than a “thank you” - how is this in any way a good faith discussion if any opposing viewpoint is immediately met with this kind of “YOU’RE the problem” response?
I do understand your frustration in those cases in which donations fail, but it seems like you’re not willing to meet us halfway and acknowledge that sometimes, donations succeed, and not by accident or luck. There’s data there - test cases we could be picking apart and seeing what critical mass needs to be reached before an instance can reliably secure donations and what we can do for admins until their instances reach that threshold. But you’re just dismissing it as nonviable even though it clearly works for a lot of places.
That is not good faith.
It’s not good faith to point to a donations working and saying that’s why it should remain that way. It’s not good faith when people are disagreeing with me yet participate in capitalism daily. I’m not talking about the important needs, we can’t escape that. I’m talking about leisure: vacations, video games, etc People here do those optional activities yet it’s some sort of sin to say let’s explore options to keep this place running and compensate the people that makes this all work