I think one of the biggest obstacles in donations is lack of transparency of what’s going on with the donated money.

Nowadays I tend to only donate to projects that have full transparency on what the money is being used for.

I don’t know if it’s the case as the presented case is not an instance I use. But on general before donating any money is the first thing I look up, and if it’s not clear I just hold my money.

But it is known that donations usually cannot sustain projects, specially “user donations”. For a project to be able to have a steady and sizeable influx of money there need to be whale donators or corporations that donate to it. Relying on user donations will always mean a very little amount of money, and I don’t think that’s going to change as most people don’t have that much disposable income anyway.

I think p2p and true decentralization is the way to go. Don’t get me wrong, fediverse is great, but is not as much decentralized as “less centralized”, truly decentralized model should be p2p. I’ve said several times that the ess centralized" model have a critical failure point and that is that instances are under a lot of pressure, economic, legal and administrative. And we are burning people out and spending all their money, because it’s a model that relies in a few number of people taking that big burden.

I think a model that the burden is smaller and mor spread among the user base will be more resilient, at least on this aspect.

Also I take the change to put up a critique on domain costs, it’s not much, but it’s part of this topic and surely they should be cheaper, as domain cost is 90% speculation and very little labor cost. I don’t know if there’s any project to democratize domain names in the clearnet, but there should be one.