cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/2665269
The platform/service is still in beta and opening up invites to its first users now.
The main developer is on mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@reiver
Their webpage if you want to signup for early access: https://spacehost.live/
From what I’ve gathered, they intend to support a variety of fediverse platforms, but have started with lemmy with kbin close behind.
They may want to add a description of what the hell it is, instead of just linking to a website that is only an email gathering prompt. Right now all I can gather from comments on it is that it monetizes the fediverse “somehow”, but there’s zero explanation of where the money comes from, who it goes to, who the whole thing supports, etc etc. If they don’t want to seem sketchy as hell, they should be forthcoming about who they are and how they work.
From the related post linked by op, it’s described as just a portion of the managed instance hosting fee going back to the project devs. So if you pay them to host a lemmy instance, a small cut goes to Lemmy devs. Doesn’t seem sketchy at all. Seems to have nothing to do with monetizing the instance itself, which could be funded by voluntary donations as normal or you could probably do membership fees as some instances do. It seems this is just about giving funding to the software devs. Hopefully this encourages other managed hosting providers to also give a cut of their revenue to the software they are using for their business.
To be clear, I’m not saying it is sketchy. I’m saying that giving absolutely zero information on a service they are ostensibly promoting makes it look sketchy. Giving even a simple breakdown of their goals and process is really the least they could do.