Hi! I’m looking to collate/list community-funded Fediverse ISPs with multiple services. Some aggregate of servers that offer multiple services, not necessarily just Fediverse related, but at least one Fediverse service.
As examples, I can list:
I know there’s one out there that also provides email (can’t recall which), which is interesting as most people wouldn’t dare.
Community underfunded. What the community is giving out barely covers the cost of the hardware, much less the labor of the admins.
Last year I considered offering accounts via a Caffe Sospeso on Communick, but it quickly became clear that is was going to suffer from the tragedy of the commons. Everyone that was willing to bear the actual operating costs would prefer to run their own servers to serve themselves, and the ones that were asking for “community supported” accounts were overwhelming just interested in free-riding.
There are people willing to donate their time* so only funding the hardware and other unavoidable running costs is often fine. If you find it too much workload, try looking for other volunteers.
*because contrary of what some economist think, it is often more enjoyable to work on something that isn’t paid, then to use the same time to work for money and pay for the service. You see the same effect with the people that prefer selfhosting as you say.
That’s a mathematical (and behavioural) indicative that your offering was simply not good enough for the target audience. If the people willing to put in the money and time were preferring to do it on their own for that same sum, it means you don’t have enough aggregated value or distinctive non-operational functionality (“perks” or “affiliations”, basically) to be unloading that value of cost on your potential users.
Reminder: we are in an era where our kind of people (focused on privacy, sovereignty, etc) know better than to commit to future payment for stuff because when you start paying for stuff, it gets Enshittified; an upstart in the current landscape is alas much more vulnerable to that.