I think it’s definitely the first one. Very unlikely things have any reason to shift to an all paid model. Even still the cost of a single user is almost negligible. The cost to support thousands of those “free riders” is still probably on the order of dollars.
Probably at first, yes. But I’d guess that after the novelty wears off, the percentage of people willing to pay $5-$10 per month for a service that can be had for $10/year (just to compare with my basic Mastodon service on Communick is going to go down. They will either start looking for an alternative where their money is covering someone they know (something that I also tried to cover with “group packages”) or they will upgrade to run their own instance so they have more control over their fediverse presence.
I think it’s definitely the first one. Very unlikely things have any reason to shift to an all paid model. Even still the cost of a single user is almost negligible. The cost to support thousands of those “free riders” is still probably on the order of dollars.
Probably at first, yes. But I’d guess that after the novelty wears off, the percentage of people willing to pay $5-$10 per month for a service that can be had for $10/year (just to compare with my basic Mastodon service on Communick is going to go down. They will either start looking for an alternative where their money is covering someone they know (something that I also tried to cover with “group packages”) or they will upgrade to run their own instance so they have more control over their fediverse presence.