I believe that the Fediverse can and should be more than a niche thing for those that reject Big Tech.
I also believe that to get there we will need businesses, service providers and professional developers who work on it because they are motivated by more than just “community values” and goodwill. For example, I have quite a bit experience with distributed systems and I know I could work to make Lemmy federation more efficient, but I can only do that if I can secure a stable income.
Please follow the linked Mastodon thread and vote on the polls. The idea is to find out if there are enough people willing to pay for services that can ease their pains with Mastodon/Lemmy/Matrix.
One of the biggest things I like about Lemmy is the lack of any business. The whole point is you can run your own instance. Social media shouldn’t be a commodity in the first place, as we can see from the death rattles of web 2 social media giants they really aren’t that profitable anymore. And most nations have a lot of laws they have to adhere to, and public opinion is turning against data farming which is one of their primary sources of revenue.
Personally I’d much prefer Lemmy continue its grass roots and democratized growth. But I cant stop you or anyone else from trying, I will just avoid supporting any attempts to create a business out of the fediverse. The last thing we need here is more capitalists lol