Would you like a pony as well?

Not only you have conflicting requirements (something to be part of the internet infrastructure while controlled by a single org) your comment gives absolutely zero constructive criticism. What about the fediverse was so bad that warrants anything like "face-planted in it's (sic) time to shine?" How/who/what are you supporting that is trying to get to the goals you listed?

The internet infrastructure is defined by central authorities. You follow the IETF's and ICANN's rules or you are definitionally not on the internet.

I am reasonably confident that DNS, TCP/IP and "social bookmarking" are each on different layers of the OSI networking model, but ok.

I'd support the same, but I'd allow ads, as long as they don't sell user data, and add long as the company is structured as a co-op or non profit org, and have full transparency on what they're spending money on, and if there's enough kitty, give back to users who are the best at moderation, quality content etc...I think fediverse is too decentralized the best you can hope for is a DAO, built as a social enterprise, maybe every user gets to vote on major things with the company. the know karma, the more your vote counts, as long as there's a way to make sure there's no karma farms...

I love the idea. But, leaving aside the idea of federation (not against it, just aware that current implementations can't handle enough users to be useful) - how do you propose that infrastructure and developers should be paid in this model?

Look how hard Wikipedia has to fight for donations and how much pushback they get over it. Wikipedia is comparatively simple, infrastructure-wise. A nonprofit reddit would need a lot more money I think.

> A nonprofit reddit would need a lot more money I think.

I don’t think so. The whole of stackoverflow is run from a single (though quite powerful) machine. Server/operation costs are cheap, employees are the big cost.

I think a donation-based model could trivially finance the service costs.

> The whole of stackoverflow is run from a single (though quite powerful) machine

No, it's not.

But anyway Stack overflow is only text, it's an irrelevant comparison.