this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
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I am not talking about the media giants, existing or yet to exist. I am talking about someone providing access to a subscriber-only Lemmy or Mastodon instance, that could be well federated, and professionally managed and moderated.
No, I don't think a subscriber-only based model would work. Seems so simple that somebody would have tried it already, but what I imagine is the exorbitant cost of running a popular site.
Today you are one of the lucky 10 thousand: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net
I know for a fact that I can run an instance with 15k users and if each one paid $10/year I could make enough to make a living, hire someone to help with moderation and would let me have time to contribute back to the codebase and work on more fediverse projects.
The beauty of this is that I don't need to have a "huge" site or a monopoly in the market. Other developers could do something similar, due to federation there could be space even for collaboration and/or expansion into other segments.
All we need is to get more people to understand that paying $10/year for something they used to have "for free" is a lot better than having your data exploited.