Ask HN: How can I fund an alternative social network?

First things first: no, I'm not planning to "build the next Facebook".

But I've been developing a very cool idea on a new , alternative and open social network (which basically, just adds social to already existing web technologies and puts it all together in a convenient and easy place).

I'm really keen on building an MVP to test out the concept and see what happens.

Then a thought came to my mind: if this picks up even a moderately slow user base, it represents a lot of money that has to be put into it (servers, storage, eventually people, etc...). So, what are the options in funding something like this?

This is what came to my mind:

1 - subscription-based (probably the worst while the product is unknown because resistance to adoption will be very high) 2 - ad-based (sucks... especially if it grows really big, then it goes the way of Facebook and try to harvest data to serve the ad biz. yeah ok, I'm dreaming high here, but bare with me for a while) 3 - donation based (and you cry constantly to not be under the red - à la wikipedia) 4 - patron based (probably only works while things are small and the team is small?)

What else is there? (obviously excluding VC funding, which for me doesn't count as sustainable income)

thanks :-)