You can buy some at the grocery store, it says “Moon Cheese” right on the damn bag! They wouldn’t just lie about what they’re selling

Especially true when the name of the instance in question is exactly what people are going to be punching into a search. They got in on the ground floor, they’ll be just fine.

It’s a perfect use case for Patreon, PayPal, and similar services that are easier to set up than any of the things you mentioned. And the stability of fiat currency is a benefit when we’re looking at covering operating costs.

Crypto is fine as an option, but it doesn’t seem like a great fit for the primary.

A lot of current users are young enough that they don’t have any experience with those things, centralized services are all they’ve ever really known. The simplicity and convenience can be a huge draw for a lot of people.

These things sort themselves out organically with some time, but it looks and feels messy until then.

In the longer-term, we’re more likely to see the opposite problem. The in-depth communities are going to be niche by definition, and interested users will be fragmented across similar communities on different instances. 100 different groups of 10, instead of a single group of 1000.

But those “groups of 10” are much more pleasant than Reddit has been for years. That could change in the future, but for now there’s passion and enthusiasm wherever you look.