Maybe a survey can disprove my opinion. but i would argue the option of having ads plus paying for the ability to remove ads is something most users would accept (even if there is a vocal minority). especially if you explain that researching and developing some forms of content (documentaries, video courses, investigative journalism) can take dozen of hours and is not feasible to do without getting paid when aiming for the highest quality.

That could be better then just restricting videos (mitra could also be a open source alternative to patreon).

Flatpak top contributor by number of commits works for collabora, so i think it is a matter of just getting funding for work. no need to start an ugly fork. its a question of how badly people want the work to be done.

I wonder how well collabora would do if they started a subscription for regular users that could vote on what issue to work on (and maybe delegate their voting power), the issue that he mention that is “not great” sound like something a lot of people would be interested in fixing. and in general with so much of our lives documented on our computer more security enhancement work could be great.

Wouldn’t it be better if this was a peertube plugin?

In blender for example you receive prioritized support when you sponsor them.

There are also various rewards (like voting on features, exclusive access to discord channels, having a sponsorship section on the website that acts as something like an ad).

There are various guides for this. but that’s the shortened version.

Active users is the standard metric used to check how much a service is used (at least as far as i know. its what i see when i look at stuff published for investors).

hexbar is on the sixth place in term of number of active users with 1.8K , lemmy.world is 18K (enable the “active users” column and sort by it to see the full list)