On the Fireside Fedi interview with Jerry ( the admin of Infosec.Exchange Mastodon instance ) a scary truth was suddenly revealed ( on 34:11 ): Just to keep the instance up and running he needs to spend up to $5000 a month, pretty much out of his pocket. Donations to the instance barely cover any of that. And if he will ask people to pay to use it, they will, rightfully so, switch to a different instance.
I am not saying that there should be an executive order to make open registrations illegal, or to force anyone to do it.
What I am saying is that the admins themselves should change their attitude about it. I understand that most of them are doing out of generosity and because they hope that by offering free spaces they will get more people to join, but I’d hope that by now most people would have realized that this is (a) not sustainable and (b) counterproductive. The reason that we don’t see a lot of the alternative models around is because the open registration instances suck out the air of everyone else in the economy.
If we keep working with this assumption that open registrations are fundamental to the Fediverse, we are going to continue is the slow decline to irrelevance. The Fediverse is never going to die, but it will be forever stunted in its potential.
That I can agree with. But I think it’s just inevitable growing pains. Free and open instances will, over time, shut down because they’re obviously unsustainable, so they won’t be sustained.
As they do, people will be left searching for instances to move to, and more and more, they’ll find that free instances just aren’t an available.