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I'm not really optimistic that Mastedon will take off outside of small circles...
I absolutely love the concept, and was part of the crowdfunding in 2011 for predecessor GNU MediaGoblin, which birthed ActivityPub protocol as a sideproject for federating servers, which is now what Mastedon uses.
I suspect without embracing advertising revenue or other ways to profit that it might not take off. As much as I hate ads, I do see many small business and self-employed benefit from advertising on FB.
@ef The Minds model would work as well.
I do hope that someone will fork the sourcecode for Mastedon server to incorporate cryptocurrency micropayments, and allow for advertising or boosting posts (e.g. the steemit model), or for doing patronage for your favorite content creator.
In the meantime, I doubt many of my real-life friends will join mastedon, but at least it will be a way to keep up-to-date with free-software developments.