You're getting downvoted because your comment doesn't add anything to the conversation. To claim something isn't free to the user just because it has externalities is a cheap rhetorical trick that doesn't give any new information or perspective.
I think it does add something, but people here are too sold on certain narratives to approach opposing ones with an open mind.
There is a fine line between donation and payment laundering. The latter happens more often than people would like to believe. For the thousands of 501c3s out there, there's nowhere near enough grannies writing $25 checks to keep even half of them in the black.
Of course it does. OP asked "how do they manage to have a business". "Depend on donations" is not viable for a large-scale operation that has costs that grows with the customer base.
It's hard to live on donations, but as a user it is still better than Signal being a for-profit company, as their goal would then be to increase the YoY revenue and eventually making unsavoury decisions.
No, there is no such thing as free lunch: either the user is at future risk or the company is at future risk. This is the best arrangement for users.
Wikipedia's costs do not grow linearly with the amount of people accessing it. Signal has to run servers and store the data for every user it has.
Also, if the wikimedia foundation closed tomorrow, Wikipedia's content would live on mirrors and IPFS gateways. It would still be useful - perhaps even more efficient than it is. Signal's outage yesterday that this logic does not apply for them. If they run out of money or infra, everyone is out in the cold.
> This is the best arrangement for users.
I'd argue that the best arrangement would be to stop hiding the operational cost per user and charge them for it. Donations can come later to cover users who can't afford the service. WhatsApp was doing just that with their $1/year fee and subsidizing market growth markets before Facebook got them.
I'd also make the case that part of the reason that we (as users) should not accept a centralized solution is due to the fact that a distributed/federated system gives room for competition and diversity. Switching from WhatsApp to Telegram or Signal or iMessage brings us no real progress in the aspect that we are still at the mercy of one single monopolistic entity.
> Wikipedia's costs do not grow linearly with the amount of people accessing it. Signal has to run servers and store the data for every user it has.
Wikipedia also needs to run servers. Slope may be less steep and there is part for hosting of content but mandatory costs are also growing linearly with the amount of people accessing it.
(WMF problems and how money is spend is a bit related issue, but it is not mandatory spending)
If network/storage were really a key factor in the costs of running wikipedia, they should be pushing it hard to get a decentralized version of it. So far political (Turkey shutting down their access in the country) and not technical/operational/capital issues have pushed them in this direction.
