I too was one of those neckbeards, so I use the term with love. :)

I certainly think we should voluntarily create some crowd-funded free-to-use services like the fediverse. But we can’t pretend that commerce doesn’t exist.

People are going to try to make money by hosting stuff online and enticing people to go there and use it. I would prefer if those people made money by charging admission instead of by collecting and selling data.

Hang on, if a social service doesn’t get paid for how does it exist?

I agree with your policy position. The three options should be:

1. Crowd-funded, free to use, privacy preserving
2. Paid, privacy preserving
3. Self-hosted

A fourth “free to use, subsidized through data collection” option shouldn’t even be legal.

But we’re not there yet. And in order to get there, we need companies like Kagi to populate the second category so that when politicians say “but how will they make money if they can’t sell data?” we have examples to point to.