I know you don’t like begware, but that’s another model that can also work (most of the instances have celebrated their first birthday recently)

"Begware" seems so negative - I like to recall the maxim: "If you are not paying for the product, then you are the product." The rise the Big Tech social media firms was propelled by convenience and there being no obvious upfront costs. Enshittification has shown us what the actual costs are.

The Fediverse shows a better way to do it but, if you aren't selling your users data, then someone has to pay. If one person is footing the bill, then that is a single point of failure. Luckily, costs are quite low, so it doesn't need a lot of people to chip in to cover the costs - I will.admit to being concerned when we launched the feddit.uk fundraiser, as I wasn't sure how much we'd raise but, within a couple of days we'd got almost enough to cover the year's costs with a good steady stream of donations. It means the instance's financial future is secure.