Fediverse

start a nonprofit that hosts services, gather donations for equipment and other stuff.

what is so difficult here?

And if he will ask people to pay to use it, they will, rightfully so, switch to a different instance.

I joined my instance's patreon and donate $1 / month. I know it is not a lot, but so far the admin says he is doing fine on cash flow, should that change I will up my donation if able.

I talked to Jerry and here is my interview: https://blenderdumbass.org/articles/clarifying_costs_of_running_the_fediverse_with_jerry_from_infosec.exchange

If Blender had a patreon or coffee or kofi, I would happily subscribe to something like $3/month. I know artists that have tens of thousands of paid subscribers and their minimal plan is $3. Blender could achieve hundreds of thousands of paid subscribers eventually imo. To make things interesting, they could release prebuilt binaries of some subprojects like NPR fork, only to subscribers, also they could do partnership and paid plugin giveaways every month to subscribers. It just needs a bit of dedicated SMM work. One-time donations just don't hit the same. I do those maybe once a year or two, and don't do another one until I get the feeling "it's been a while".

The expense of running busy servers is too much to expect of anyone. I haven't even tried to figure out how the math would work but I wonder if the ultimate solution could be more of a BitTorrent architecture where the "server" is a hive of users' computers all sharing the load? I'm a software developer but have never worked on anything in that area, but since BitTorrent works it certainly seems feasible. Comments?