I believe that the Fediverse can and should be more than a niche thing for those that reject Big Tech.
I also believe that to get there we will need businesses, service providers and professional developers who work on it because they are motivated by more than just “community values” and goodwill. For example, I have quite a bit experience with distributed systems and I know I could work to make Lemmy federation more efficient, but I can only do that if I can secure a stable income.
Please follow the linked Mastodon thread and vote on the polls. The idea is to find out if there are enough people willing to pay for services that can ease their pains with Mastodon/Lemmy/Matrix.
So, if its already possible. What would your freemium features add?
Each software has, in fact, its rules/terms. Peertube, for example, is explicitly non-profit.
To me what you are doing trying to monetise something that is completely free of charge, while pretending you are doing it to promote the fediverse, “making it mainstream” (the last thing the hardcore fedizens want), IS dishonest. So I guess we are even.