Even many regional message boards or forums we’re very active. Boards.ie in Ireland was the nerds internet forum. A fediverse before there was one. It was the go to for info about anything tech related or internet culture. Whirlpool in Australia is still the go to for info about internet and broadband, and is still active, if much reduced.

I don’t know. It’s an interconnected network or web. Maybe internet might work. We could call them websites.

With Pihole off, look for your gateway address. That will be your router address. Are you using windows on your usual pc? Ipconfig command should show you your gateway, easily.

Then tap that into your browser to log in to your router and deactivate dhcp from it.

Don’t forget the splanchnik effect.

Omg, thanks for helping me to get the names. The arrs indeed.

Oh, I completely agree. What I mean is that a not for profit can still live in the commercial world of it wants.

Not for profits still need stuff. Like offices or servers or staff. How the funding comes about without compromising the mission is the question.

Look at cancer charities fund raising. Look at Wikipedia. Look at Firefox.

The funding model doesn’t have to be the same for every instance. Some could be just volunteer funded or donated by the admins as a cost of their hobby.

However, the broader community will not tolerate a social media space that is not professionally run with uptime and lack of errors and downtime. The only way the commercial ones die is if the free ones are better. Look at piracy. It’s not a cost problem in music versus movies versus games, it’s a service problem.

It would be a mistake to not realise that they operate in the same virtual space as profit driven corporations though. They should still be professionally run with proper pr and marketing. Whether that is volunteer led, or alternative funding like Wikipedia or charging corporate clients etc.

Personally, I’d like corporate integration to fund the free part, but with no additional benefit. Just the same access that private users get for free. Otherwise it’s a slippery slope.

Hard to regulate though. How woukd you verify, who would verify? Could be like fair trade products, whereby there is a certifying body. User instances could decide to only federate with corporate instances that are registered with this non profit. They would pay for their access, like Reddit is asking from their apps, except actually reasonable costs. This could be disbursed to large instances with over X amounts of users to fund their computing needs.