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the sad reality of 2025 is that a large swath of folks have been driven to believe the only value they may have to offer to the internet is to be the product of a company. that needs to change. even folks who say they don’t want to be the product cannot fathom not being the product…

this obviously makes sense, years and years and years of corporations progressively getting worse about making people the product certainly starts to make you think it’s just inevitable. but it can change, and i am very excited to see that happen.

I remember in the early days a number of users (myself included) encouraged Bluesky to introduce a payment option. I'd have been happy to pay a fixed amount of my own choosing, not for extra services/privileges, but to help keep things running. Being supporter instead of product. Nothing came of it.

There is a culture of "free" (as in beer) that has dominated the Internet since the late 90s when corporations figured out how to monetise that and use it as barrier to entry for any challengers. This has become so pervasive that ...

not only do people demand services to be free but games, tool, art, and in our case audio plugins. We are just two people doing, imho, good things and people complain when a complex work costs a couple of drinks. Heck, we get complaints that some of our actually free things don't do enough 😅 Ideas?

Given how closely linked the „culture of free“ is with consumer-as-product, I think more and more people find paying for their favorite services/content fair and natural. Cf. Patreon, Ko-Fi and the like. If Bsky doesn‘t lose its core community (and the current „why did they ban Link?“ are a 1/