I have a vision of what’s to come so I’ll throw it out here.

When things truly take off there’ll likely be companies selling cloud hosted instances, the server requirements aren’t massive for a small group so it’ll be cheap.

That’d solve the issue of losing accounts or small communities, but huge communities would have to be hosted on huge servers just to handle the amount of content coming in.

Which means money will play a role somehow, imagine a community with millions of visitors every day. Could a server relying on donations sustain that? Or better question is could they sustain that better than a huge tech conglomerate?