@breitensteinart One can make a living off free and open source. Many companies can do it. For example, the folks who make Nextcloud.
The bigger question I have is: how do these VCs plan on achieving their ROI?
@atomicpoet They might be still be under the impression that growth in user numbers = revenue in the future.
@atomicpoet @breitensteinart There are two ways to make money in social media: subscription/value add monetization or harvesting the shit out of user data (or both if you’re really evil).
The former isn’t as lucrative as the latter.
User data has long been a gold mine for startups because it’s pretty easy to sell to Google, Facebook, etc for correlation in an already enormous data lake.
Until moth.social says otherwise, I am assuming nefarious intentions.
@atomicpoet @breitensteinart
Except Nextcloud and other companies are selling support services in a B2B environment. Other than making white label purchaser-specific versions of Mastodon I don't see any source of profit for them other than the sale of data / including advertising.