And yet probably less alone than when using polluted and terrible social media.
I would pay, FWIW. I am actively looking for a decent community of humans online that isn’t run by selling data to AI farms or trying to get my eyeballs all the time. Unfortunately social media ate many of the places I previously used to call home.
Those interested in this branch of the discussion might find Dave Winer’s blog series about building an open social network on top of the RSS standard worth a read. Here’s one of many posts: http://scripting.com/2025/06/28/211301.html
But even paid business models get polluted with the usage driven metrics over time. Netflix is paid but now has advertisements. They have stated that their main competitor is sleep, which is obviously detrimental to the user. How do we prevent this from happening for such a paid social media?
Netflix introduced an additional billing model to cater to those folks who would prefer ads to a subscription fee, but has not removed the no-ads model for a higher fee. I'm happy to pay for my ad-free Netflix, and I respect that others might want to choose differently. This is not a dark pattern, it's a light/good/gold (?) pattern.
I would pay, FWIW. I am actively looking for a decent community of humans online that isn’t run by selling data to AI farms or trying to get my eyeballs all the time. Unfortunately social media ate many of the places I previously used to call home.