How would you make money as a mastodon instance? Pay to be a member? I don't see the incentive for the average user to pay when it's so easy to join a free instance (I'm considering the average person doesn't know how to host their own).
The incentive might become more apparent as time goes on.
long term up-time commitments
stability guarantees
dedicated Moderation services
dedicated help service
performance guarantees
additional features or parallel services beyond ordinary masto (eg search, blogging, feed sorting/algorithms, or even fusion of additional platforms like lemmy)
active sponsorship of developers contributing back to masto
subscription is part of a dedicated app too (see, eg,
Mammoth)
As a Mastodon subscriber on a typical server, I haven’t found any of that to be particularly necessary. Perhaps there are some advanced users who might find it useful though. 
Interesting. I feel like long term stability, up time and performance would be valuable to many users. In many ways I’d say just going on to mastodon.social is a bit of a cop out as it heavily dilutes the decentralised structure that is arguably the point of all of this. Multiple paid instances would be healthier. And there, as a user on a relatively peripheral instance but one that is paid-for, longevity and stability become increasingly valuable.
Otherwise, instance providers putting the work into trying to provide a relatively “complete” fediverse palette of tools while making it as easy as possible for the users could also be interesting.
What I mean is that long-term stability and up time don’t seem to be a problem for current servers.
It's definitely an issue with small, niche servers unfortunately. Had a friend's just go down unexpectedly this week with no warning to let the handful of people on there migrate, so they're starting over from scratch. My craft server shut down a couple weeks ago although we did get a month warning there so could go through the proper migration process.
I try and donate to all my Fedi servers just to make it worth the admin's while, because I prefer smaller servers in general but don't want them to suddenly disappear!
Yea I’d say it isn’t a problem for anyone until it is. All of the notable examples of a server going down that I’ve seen were a surprise to its users. On top of that, I’d expect many have fairly hefty expectations of their server’s longevity. Like 10-15 years, more or less as long as they’ve been using Twitter etc.
You could probably trust that an instance you're paying for will be more stable/less likely to randomly shut down.
How would you make money as a mastodon instance? Pay to be a member? I don't see the incentive for the average user to pay when it's so easy to join a free instance (I'm considering the average person doesn't know how to host their own).
The incentive might become more apparent as time goes on.
As a Mastodon subscriber on a typical server, I haven’t found any of that to be particularly necessary. Perhaps there are some advanced users who might find it useful though. 
Interesting. I feel like long term stability, up time and performance would be valuable to many users. In many ways I’d say just going on to mastodon.social is a bit of a cop out as it heavily dilutes the decentralised structure that is arguably the point of all of this. Multiple paid instances would be healthier. And there, as a user on a relatively peripheral instance but one that is paid-for, longevity and stability become increasingly valuable.
Otherwise, instance providers putting the work into trying to provide a relatively “complete” fediverse palette of tools while making it as easy as possible for the users could also be interesting.
What I mean is that long-term stability and up time don’t seem to be a problem for current servers.
It's definitely an issue with small, niche servers unfortunately. Had a friend's just go down unexpectedly this week with no warning to let the handful of people on there migrate, so they're starting over from scratch. My craft server shut down a couple weeks ago although we did get a month warning there so could go through the proper migration process.
I try and donate to all my Fedi servers just to make it worth the admin's while, because I prefer smaller servers in general but don't want them to suddenly disappear!
Yea I’d say it isn’t a problem for anyone until it is. All of the notable examples of a server going down that I’ve seen were a surprise to its users. On top of that, I’d expect many have fairly hefty expectations of their server’s longevity. Like 10-15 years, more or less as long as they’ve been using Twitter etc.
You could probably trust that an instance you're paying for will be more stable/less likely to randomly shut down.