It's almost as though the large-scale abandonment of old-skool small-scale, independent domain-specific web forums in favour of huge centralised platforms was a mistake...
(Just out of interest, can anyone give me an idea of the typical running costs of, say, a phpBB or vBulletin web forum with a couple of hundred users?)
But the SEO and marketing costs to get any kind of traction these days are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. That’s the real reason we can’t have decentralized communities anymore, the big guys have formed oligopoly. They control the market and prevent any competition by owning user attention.
I also run a BBS on a Raspberry Pi that plays host to a few hundred DAU, that engage in chat, forums, a MUCK, and the occasional file transfer which runs on my home internet connection.
I am sure someone will jump right in and tell me that I am doing it wrong and I can host everything on an AWS micro VPS for $4/month, but the amount that I pay is for my server. I also suspect someone will jump right in and tell me I am not allowed to host a server on my home internet connection.
Maybe some people want that. Your "we" is putting in a lot of work.
I think this is a core assumption that I'm not sure I believe in.
Works for the public deserve public (distinct from government) funding. There are many things that say "if you don't give us money, we can't continue to exist."
"We need enough money to function" is a completely different sell than "we want to 1000x our investors investments."
Reddit's enshitification[1] is a function of needing to please investors. Many people are very happy with old.reddit.com, yet reddit paid for ux devs to implement dark patterns because that's what investors demanded.
I don't want to pay for signal, but I pay for it. I don't want to pay for Wikipedia, but I pay for it. I don't want to pay for my local radio stations, but I pay for them. I don't want to pay for my politicians to represent me, but I pay for that. I don't want to pay my taxes, but I've traveled enough to see what happens without government institutions.
I think people are willing to sacrifice money for purpose. Reddit and twitter were great free speech platforms before billionaire malfeasance. These platforms threatened authoritarians world wide. That is purpose I think people would financially sacrifice for in both external funding, and loss of income.
I think it is pretty clear that the next great social media platform will be a 501c3 and they will ask for money in the same way that radio stations do.
[1]https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys