@cholling@hachyderm.io @mcc I don't know that I think the advertising model is going away any time soon, but I do think that until we find workable ways to sustainably fund the upkeep of online spaces at scale things will remain pathological; users will remain the product rather than the customer (as has often been observed). Paying people to lie to us so that we'll buy things and then hoping they may support useful online spaces as a byproduct was never a good model, and the only widespread alternative is generally VC-funded services operating at a loss who just haven't started down that path *yet*.

This seems like a key problem that Mastodon and other non-commercial services haven't really solved either. As far as I can tell, most servers just rely on the sporadic charity of a small minority of their users.