That's a fair comment, but a non-profit that relies on donations (as opposed to selling services to somebody other than me) strikes me as very different than Facebook et al.
It’s a viable model though. WhatsApp had only ~50 employees and already 500m users when it was purchased for ~$20B. They were already profitable on the $1/year after the first year subscription model.
Signal is approaching similar metrics (except it’s supported by a $50m endowment from Brian Acton instead of donations).
It’s easy to say that the mechanics of chat are pretty simple and a global chat service can be maintained by a roomful of engineers, but is the original algorithm-free, chronological Twitter that much more complex? It’s hard to believe there aren’t any other billionaires out there who would be willing to create an endowment securing the perpetual existence of a free social network.
Charging $1 a year like WhatsApp used to wouldn’t be such a bad idea once it got bootstrapped either, since it would make it much harder to run bot armies.
