Downvotes rewarded with hugs.
You’re already free to support developers and instance owners financially if they’ve set up either Patreon, OpenCollective or LiberaPay 🤷 That’s money going where it’s needed.
If I understand SubClub correctly, it’s monetisation on a user level, which in the past has only really given us influencers. I rather enjoy not having that kind of bullshit on the fediverse.
There’s another reason I don’t share “It’s FOSS” links anywhere: this should have been a github issue but it’s turned into a clickbaity headline. Every othe article coming out of “It’s FOSS” is either low effort, sensationalist, or both.
The answer is one click away in their FAQ:
Why do you charge for attendance?
Several reasons:
- Organizing conferences costs time and money, like many other things in the Fediverse. We believe the sooner the Fediverse finds a way to pay for itself that doesn’t depend on the heroic efforts of a small number of individuals, the better. We want to build something that is sustainable, and to do that, it needs to know how to pay for itself.
- It aligns the objectives between organizers and attendees, and keeps us organizers focused on what you want out of the conference; as opposed to us pushing an agenda, or letting a sponsor undule influence the agenda.
- In our long experience organizing conferences we have learned that people who pay for an event are much more likely to actually attend. Free-of-charge conferences often have more no-show’s then actual attendees.
Just to weigh in here with a bit of political nuance — “tankies” are certainly defined by their leftist politics, but moreso by their apologist defense of regimes that more or less transparently use socialist or communist maxims as a cover for state capitalism or straight out autocracy.
Tankies may be the loudest voices to claim themselves Marxist or socialist, but please don’t mistake them as actually representing those ideologies truthfully or completely. Personally, I see tankies as more indebted to a cold war-style school of Soviet dogma transplanted to current autocracies. Marx and Trotsky would have rolled their eyes at either.