Being a shared service, Gmail is not what I mean (unless you’re talking about Google Workspace, I guess). I’m talking about providing Lemmy hosting for custom domains so each user gets their own instance. Think @cerevant@cerevant.tld instead of @cerevant@lemmy.world: The paid service does the actual hosting and admin tasks, but the user/owner controls the policy (that only applies to himself) and thus can’t get booted off, only defederated.

…Hmm, the more I write about this the more it sounds susceptible to the same problem that self-hosted email has (the spammers ruined it, so all the big services preemptively block mail coming from less-than-well-known domains and don’t even give them a chance to prove their legitimacy). I kinda feel like it might only work if personal instances became the norm, and wouldn’t be tenable if small instances and big instances had to coexist. I guess it just goes to show how many unknowns there are about how the Fediverse will mature and scale.