Created a new community, !aom@lemm.ee, for the newly-released Age of Mythology game

Nice, I went ahead and created !aom@level-up.zone . As soon as you make a post there I can make you a moderator as well.

I'm really glad to see more people getting the point of these instances. Reducing drama is certainly one of the biggest factors, and "good fences make good neighbors" is a good principle here.

what’s the business model for a paid service

It's a difficult one, if I am being honest. I started this as a side project because I believed that with all the abuses from Facebook and Twitter, people would finally understand that "if you are not paying for the product, you are the product" is not just a nice slogan. Unfortunately, it seems that the large majority of people will rather live jumping from instance to instance and project to project instead of paying a few bucks per month to support independent developers.

But to give you a more cheerful response, Communick is not just about Fediverse. My background is in telecommunications, and the idea is to offer any type of service for messaging that is based on open standards, which also includes VoIP. It also provides Matrix and I've been trying to figure out how I can add support for SIP calling in a way that could make this a compelling alternative for Digital nomads that need to deal with multiple phone numbers.

Looking at the Fediverse only, some reasons to charge for access:

• it is a lot easier to handle moderation. Trolls and spammers are not willing to pay a few bucks per month when they can do it for free in the open instances.
• the instances never get oversubscribed. I only need to invest in more infrastructure if I have more customers. All of the "free" instances end up invariably having to close registrations, or to beg for donations or simply crumble under their own weight.
• I strongly believe that charging a bit from everyone is more fair than asking big donations from some people to make up for the freeloaders.
• There should be enough people out there who know how much their time is worth and understand the value proposition to make this a sustainable business.
• Because of federation, network effects are not a huge deal. A theoretical centralized social network with tens of thousand users is pretty much dead, but Communick can be relevant to its customers even when we are super small.

I don't mind the suspicion, but I think it is beyond silly.

I'm one self-funded developer who is stubborn enough to run this at a loss for almost 5 years now, and my greatest ambition here would be to maybe get 10-15k customers to pay me $30/year to be able to live with minimal comfort, provide for my family and hopefully contribute back to open source and the open web. Yet people want to paint me as some mastermind behind some huge corporation burning money around from investors and looking for a way to exploit users.

I'm honestly tired of this crab mentality. People think it's a sin to be upfront about their work and how much they value their time. It's also quite ironic that I can see the huge overlap: those who are always virtue signaling and complaining about bosses who don't pay enough to their employees are the same ones who refuse to patronize a small independent business, but go look at the phones in their hands and there is an 80% chance they will be holding a shiny new iPhone.