if i'm going to pay money to use social media i should be allowed to host it myself lol

like mastodon isn't NECESSARILY free but the difference is when you pay for mastodon you actually get something real out of it (a server/instance you can operate lol)

oh and making people pay to join your fledgling social media software pretty much guarantees your initial adoption will come from privileged white folks with disposable incomes which pretty much guarantees that that software is going nowhere because privileged white folks have literally zero loyalty to anything lmao

i'm tagging these as vero takes but they're really just about social media in general