The connotation has more to do with the long tradition of Pirate Radio, not a bunch of random CIA stuff.
The difference here is that you literally sign in with your existing Fediverse identity.
Some of the people in the space are tired of panhandling, and would like to actually get paid for things they do. This can include: covering monthly instance costs, selling subscriptions to premium articles for a newspaper, supporting a video creator on PeerTube, or donating to an open source project. A subscription system is one way of doing that.
It's actually not too bad to run, it's just that my community instance has grown a lot, and is close to four years old at this point. Issues crop up, I mostly wrote this guide to share some insights on how I deal with things.
Let me think...
That's just what I could find from scrounging around, I know there's more.
It's less expensive than you would think. Object Storage is actually really, really cheap in a lot of cases. I host a PeerTube instance, and while it does cost me money every month, the cost is decently offset by recurring donations, as well as the savings that Object Storage brings.
Jira. In the Software-as-a-Service world, it's often the tool of choice by Product teams to track issues, by breaking everything down into stories.
It's a horrible, slow, janky mess. The interface is confusing and poorly laid out, you can easily have too many options all over the place, and how its even used can vary dramatically from one company to another.
Salesforce is also trash for very similar reasons. How Sales people around the world all vouched for this thing is beyond me.
While I think you're correct about it ultimately being their project, and that users are in no place to demand or expect anything, this thing takes on whole other dimensions once a project is all about building a social platform. Particularly one where volunteers host part of the network themselves.
It's one thing to look at some random demand to write everything in a P2P architecture because DNS is too centralized. When I worked on Diaspora, I literally saw people demand stuff like that, and laughed it off. I'm trying to build a platform that exists today, not some pixie dream bullshit compromised of academic circle-jerking.
But when it comes to basic table stakes for participating in a network that already exists, things change a bit. This is especially true when you're connecting to a global network that has:
Suddenly, it makes a lot of sense to say "you know what, admins are going to want to filter this shit out, maybe it's reasonable for them to have some tools and fixtures that are part of core."
Unfortunately, these devs are the kind of people who scream angrily when someone says "Hey, this thing doesn't actually respect local image deletes / GDPR stuff / content deletion on account deletion". To me, that's fucking insane.
It's technically possible, just really, really hard. One example of a successful migration was the transition from calckey.social to firefish.social. It was a massive, extremely difficult undertaking, though.
A big problem involves how user identities are tied to instances. If there were a way to decouple that, I think a lot of the pain goes away.
Yeah, they didn't want their money going to the Taliban, and it's a little shaky as to whether the Taliban's Ministry of IT would take a stricter content enforcement on their ccTLD. For a while, it was only possible to renew domains, not buy new ones.
Still, I stuck with the title because the Taliban is still the reason.
For all intents and purposes, the dev did state their intentions on releasing the code "when it's ready", and was super active in working on it. Not releasing, and relying on one server running a specific upstream branch were definitely mistakes, 100%. But, I think the dev legitimately believed they would hit that target, which was a prerequisite for releasing.
RFF is amazing, and offers so much high-quality music. Historically, it's all been done by one guy, supporting 500+ artists.