cabbage , 8 hours ago

Then again, the Emacs server is not shutting down over costs. It's shutting down because the admin is tired of dealing with assholes on the internet.

Sure, you could pay people to do that as well, or maybe preferably, better tools need to be developed to ease the burden of individual instance admins. But this specific case is explicitly not about server costs.

"There's no such thing as free lunch" is a stupidity. There is. You have soup kitchens all over the world, the volunteers working for them do so because it gives them meaning, and they are often provided ingredients for free from supermarkets that would otherwise end in the trash.

It's a dumb metaphor that doesn't even work in the original example. There is more to life than capitalism.

That didn't mean nobody should pay. I make monthly donations to my Mastodon instance, and will probably branch out soon to support to other services I use as well. But everything is not always about money.