My own Communick offers managed hosting for things like Mastodon, Matrix, Lemmy, PixelFed, GoToSocial, Takahe for those that want to have their own server but do not want to deal with the hassle of managing it or worrying about security updates. I also offer paid accounts: $29/year gives you an account at all of our “flagship” instances: meaning you can get an account on Mastodon, Lemmy, Matrix and Funkwhale.

There are other providers like omg.lol (Mastodon account at social.lol and some other cool services for $20/year) and mastodon.green (accounts cost $1/month).

All of these servers are of course smaller and less popular than the ones that are open for registration, but unsurprisingly they are stable, well managed, free of drama and (AFAIK) never been linked to spammers or trolls. IOW, “you get what you pay for”.

Valve is a company with $BILLIONS in revenue per year. The problem is the size of the corporations, not the profit incentive.

I think we need more companies, but each of them smaller in headcount and customer base. For the Fediverse, this is perfect.

To illustrate the point: all I really want from Communick is to get to 10000 paying customers. That would bring $300k in revenue, I would be able to draw a good salary from it (still less than any drone from Big Tech makes though), make good on my pledge to give 20% of profits to developers, hire some people to help with moderation and so on…

Notice that 10 thousand users is less than 1% of the current amount of people in the Fediverse, if we had half of the users interested in this model, it would mean that there is room for (at least!) another 50 small businesses like mine, which is more than enough to have a healthy competition around.

I’m not sure if this has happened yet

I have more than 15 topic-specific instances, and we are in absolute agreement about why this is the best arrangement for group federation.

Also, thank you very much for leading by example. Lets hope the bigger instances also see the value in the initiative.