@ItsThatDeafGuy @gumnos @dalias I believe (but could be very wrong) that “most” people would happily pay for good enough solutions that don’t have advertising and don’t sell your data to others. That’s how the Internet used to work.
But most successful services get bought out by bigger ones, with shareholders and growth targets. At which point covering your costs stops being the goal
Yeah, I’m cynical. Sue me, #genX
Having been around the internet since pre-web days, there was very little paying others for services in the early days—the only paying involved setting up your own (obtaining your own hardware, paying for connectivity & electricity, etc), Or paying tuition to a university that gave you internet access
@gumnos @ItsThatDeafGuy @dalias yeah, me too. I have the advantage of still working at a uni with more bandwidth than it knows what to do with, and an endless supply of end of life server hardware. Hosting isn’t an issue to me.
But ISPs are progressively making it harder and harder to host stuff at home (CGNAT, particularly), despite rising link speeds.
Nowadays, you need a friendly sysadmin somewhere with spare bandwidth and rackspace, or money to pay a hosting provider
@WiteWulf @gumnos @ItsThatDeafGuy Getting a public IP costs about $3-5/mo from a cheap VPS provider.