I hope the @Mastodon foundation (or contributors) will incorporate some hooks to enable paid instances. Maybe I'll get banished to Twitter for even suggesting it, but processing, bandwidth, and storage cost money. I'd gladly subscribe to a paid instance so I didn't have to worry some volunteer somewhere might go bankrupt without adequate donations.
@ryangorley @Mastodon I do not know the rules for using the Mastodon sw, the ActivityPub protocol and more. But I believe it is fully possible for commercial companies to set up instances (and each instance has of course like today the possibility to exclude other instances from their network). For ex the Vivaldi browser company has an instance (no fee I think) for anyone to join. Also the one I use is a kind of company. And companies can set up for employees.
