> Not all software needs to rake in billions. Federation allows services and networks like the Fediverse and XMPP to scale up to large numbers of users without forcing a single behemoth to sell its soul to foot the bill. Although anti-domestication business models are less profitable, they still allow the creation of the same technologies that were enabled by user domestication. All that’s missing is an advertising budget; the biggest advertising some of these projects get is long unpaid blog posts.
Instead of building a platform that requires one actor to scale up to millions of users, build a platform that's simple enough for it to require less development effort and scale to only a few hundred/thousand users per federated server. Delegate hosting to the 0.05% of users willing and technical enough to run a server.
The Fediverse has scaled to millions of users with a grand total of $0.00 VC money.
Related: when people first envisioned the ideas that led to networks like the Web, sceptics would ask questions such as "Who's going to pay to make all those hyperlinks? What's the financial incentive to upload a document?"
If a system is designed right, there doesn't need to be a financial incentive (i.e., an ROI) to grow.