I don’t understand how this is going to take off if no one is going to make money from this.
A server can’t really charge its users. I and most people would probably not pay to help support a server. Twitter works because most people who actually interact on it don’t pay.
And the source of Twitter’s woes is honestly because the company has never been profitable (unlike Facebook, Google and so on which did).
Also, requiring a domain name to have an alias? So this service is just going to be a community of sysadmins and web developers?
The simplest/best way I could think of is for users to be paid for their messages. You post something insightful, funny, worthy of attention, other users decide to pay you 0.00whatever USD. The problem then becomes that we haven't actually solved micro and nano-transactions in these 30-something years of HTTP over TCP connections [1].
> I don’t understand how this is going to take off if no one is going to make money from this.
I'd pay something for it. The way the author describes it I would have a 'Small-World' server. I'd be willing to pay $5-10 per month to connect that to a 'Big-World' server. After that I'd expect the costs to scale with the size of my 'Small-World' server. As long as that's based on resource consumption rather than some kind of per-user scheme I think it would work fairly well.
The biggest issue for me would be setting up and maintaining a server. I don't really want to do that and a hosted service for it probably skews towards costs that are more than I'd be willing to pay just to be connected to the network.
A server can’t really charge its users. I and most people would probably not pay to help support a server. Twitter works because most people who actually interact on it don’t pay.
And the source of Twitter’s woes is honestly because the company has never been profitable (unlike Facebook, Google and so on which did).
Also, requiring a domain name to have an alias? So this service is just going to be a community of sysadmins and web developers?