The difference would be not having to deal with a publicly-traded multinational company at the mercy of its own board ready to sell the ship for parts to the first narcissistic billionaire foolish enough to make an offer.

If a company can provide this kind of services, then another company could provide a similar service on the Fediverse, where Twitter had a monopoly on its own network.

Of course are there business models, actually for all of them. And the not able to monetize isn't true either, as some can and will include propaganda. The fediverse gives them, from single content creators to structures like news paper outlets and so on to publish more or less restricted and offer social media acounts to their readers, employees and so on.

Actually @Hypolite Petovan, if every twitter celeb, lets say with +1 million followers setup his own instance, they already have their dot com site, they would probably/maybe take 10k users with them. TheMusk would be left behind with perhaps 1 million users and an activitypub integration .. :)
Every fan 1 usd a month and you pay hosting and moderation of lot's of nodes all over the place. TheMusk set the bar at 8 usd x month and actually most said: "it's not the money, .. it's ..". So now we know that 1 usd a month dedicated privacy aware pleasant social web is a service easy to offer.

am I wrong?

@Jonathan Lamothe (he/him) And I can't imagine their social media fans cough up even that much for this privilege.

@Hypolite Petovan@Jonathan Lamothe (he/him) ❌

It's from "a service" up to "a good business".

People are able to pay sh** load of money for cards, nft's, posters, entrances for events. Newspaper outlets already have member ship, comment section, paywall -> service of some kind, and so on.

If you have first mover access on the concert community for publications, sponsorship, and so on that's a kind of personalized effective advertisement. The german satire artist @janboehm created an instance for his show and one for his followers (edi.social + det.social). On tw he has 2.7m followers, his server is a t 10k now and they are state television (ZDF), financed by kinda tax payer money.

8 usd for verification a month, how many labels will look at their artists and say: "Let's setup a server and get rid of mediators!"

@…ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ jesuisatire bitPickup Absolutely none. 8 USD/month is a cheap price to pay compared to the knowledge required to effectively run any Fediverse instance.

@Hypolite Petovan

You mean you can't setup and moderate an instance for a thousand content creators with 8.000 usd a month?

@…ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ jesuisatire bitPickup Not if you don't have any clue where to start from. Dealing directly with Twitter to get a discount in bulk probably sounds easier from a label business person standpoint.

@Hypolite Petovan

That's for sure is Elon's point.

On the other hand, their are already 4k mastodon instances out their so that can't be to difficult, and as I heard, their is coming lot's of free labor force on the market ..

Bring it on it.