I should make the context more specific. I don’t want to host an expensive instance on day one. However, my long term goal is much bigger: I want to host an instance that serves as a competitive alternative to Facebook/Threads/X to the users in my country, because disinformation is overwhelming here. Thanks to federation, the instances all over the world helps, theoretically I don’t have to scale as large as Facebook/X. But to reach that competitive scale, I don’t think I can just rely on the “kind, moral and awakened” users’ donation, so that’s why I’m thinking about such charging mechanism.

Yes, and possibly instanceA provides better bandwidth and better moderation. if everyone do it, then we lose a good instance in the end.

Yes, ideally, if users pay to their own instances then everything’s fine. I hope the world is ideal, either. But why shouldn’t we have a mechanism that can make fediverse sustainable, not rely on the kindness of humanity? Even the mechanism charges the users, fediverse is still intrinsically far better than the privately owned platforms. You still can host your own instances cuz it’s open source, you can defederate. I don’t think the value of fediverse is degraded by charging other instances. Open source doesn’t means enjoy everything for free.

Thank you for your comments. Maybe my solution is stupid, but I think the problem I wanted to tackle is practical and simple: how to let the owners of high-quality instances get paid? I don’t think everything should be free, in the end the users have to pay the fees in some way, and the nature of fediverse may induce difficulties for the process.

Or, let me rephrase it simpler: if lemmy.world or some big instances got shortage of donation someday, then what should we do? Just give up and go back to X/Facebook/reddit? I’m just trying to answer this question. Could you also share your ideas to this question?