I don’t think mutual aid can work well like that on the internet. Works great in person, works OK for GoFundMe-type stuff like “I had something happen to me that will take a lot of money to fix”. Too easy to scam and grift for small stuff like this though, where for all you know they’re just a very clever dog on the internet.

Even non-profits aren’t immune to hostile takeovers. OpenAI is a for-profit company controlled by a non-profit, and that hasn’t stopped them from turning into something indistinguishable from a regular for-profit company. They’ve also been making noise about abandoning the fig leaf of the non-profit.

Mozilla is another one where nominally they’re a for-profit controlled by a non-profit, but they’re now getting into shoving ads in your face just like any other company.

It is harder to turn bad when you’re a non-profit but not impossible, without something of a poison pill that makes it unacceptable to for-profit takeovers.

I think supporter badges would be a good monetization model for each instance. ActivityPub could allow for an arbitrary “badge” field (to my knowledge it doesn’t currently have anything like this but I also haven’t read the spec), and each server could fill it in however it likes. Other servers/users could limit displaying them if they get abused, à la pig poop balls on hexbear (or whatever it’s moved on to being called now).

Is there a way to leave comments from Lemmy?