It’s not just the funding, it’s the business overall. Public companies need to show growing revenues year to year, and worse: growing revenues with a minimum yield. A product can grow by attracting more users up to a certain point. Then the only way to grow is by making more money out of the same users base. If the revenue is based on ads:

• Extend the product so that the user’s engagement increases (channels/others kind).
• Add paying features (freemium approach, that includes blue stars or whatever the hell you want it to look like…)
• Serve them ads

Freemium is not always working well and Meta never used it. They have no new great idea to extend the product without eating their other products users bases. So the only one left is more ads.

Funding is not the issue, for-profit companies are. Non-profit is the way to go. Federation is even better as individuals/families/small organizations can run their own servers.-

WhatsApp was charging $1-$3 per year before Facebook’s acquisition. They had 600M+ users and a team of twelve people. It was beautiful while it lasted.

Hopefully we can carry out the original mission with Signal.

It’s not very easy to solve the issue of infinite growth in a world with finite resources. The fundamental issue is that it’s just not physically possible, but they keep trying. Either we continue this cycle and eventually destroy the planet irreversibly, or we acknowledge that maybe money isn’t everything, and that maybe [the vast majority of] people aren’t inherently egoitistical monsters, and we move on to different systems.

The enshittification process in a nutshell.

@Auth
So that’s why we donate to @signalapp
@MazonnaCara89

WhatsApp was not free and already had a massive user base before Facebook bought it.

Hope this will turn people to alternatives.

Eastern Europe loves the app Viber that Rakuten bought, which has had ads for years.

People LOVE a walled garden of their friends are there, too.