This is not what I am asking. I am asking if OP would join a commercial provider of Mastodon, where access is only given to paying subscribers.
I am asking because I happen to run one of those (https://communick.com) since 2019.
I am asking because I happen to run one of those (https://communick.com) since 2019.
Even now I can’t find your service in the first page of my search results. I ended up just setting up a recurring donation to Mastodon.social via Patreon.
Your service looks very cool. Just pointing out that it is very hard to discover even for people who are willing to pay, as the GP comment notes and hopefully providing a useful experience report.
To be honest though, I think that Mastodon is an evolutionary dead-end. It had a huge head start in the space, but I am reasonably sure that it is not the future of the open social web. I am more inclined to pivot into a multi-protocol client (like Pidgin) and offering ancillary services than trying to pick a champion and invest into promoting it.
Interesting, this was my layman's read too after a while of trying to get into it. To me it felt like it was opinionated but in ways that I disagreed with.
For example, instead of a separate UI for private messages, they just add another option to the visibility selector. From a technical perspective I suppose this is somewhat elegant, but from a UX perspective it felt wrong. I saw a thread where people disagreed with it and the maintainers told them to pound sand. Similarly with quote tweets.
I know you mentioned not trying to pick champions, but are there any alternatives that you thought were particularly interesting? I'm willing to put in a little time to try things out.
The other thing I want to note is I just tried to use the "Set up Auto-Pay" button on Communick and got the error "Could not set up auto pay. Please contact support". I'd love to sign up though.