Some of the people in the space are tired of panhandling, and would like to actually get paid for things they do. This can include: covering monthly instance costs, selling subscriptions to premium articles for a newspaper, supporting a video creator on PeerTube, or donating to an open source project. A subscription system is one way of doing that.
Seconded. Commercialism and monetizing everything is what caused the www to rot. We don't need it here. Neoliberalism has already robbed generations of the right to simply exist or create without a profit motive, among other things, like literacy. Pretty sick of it.
We’re demanding they don’t come here and demand money. If they don’t want to provide content for free like the rest of us, we don’t mind them not being here.
No one is demanding them full stop. If you want to make us pay, we don’t want you. That’s an un-demand.
I’m one voice of a community. As you can tell from many of the other posts in here, it seems to be a majority sentiment on the majority leftist Fediverse.
The point is, we are enjoying free content without any advertising and monetisation slapped on. If that happens, then we just leave, we are not demanding free content, we just consume it because it exists. The donation model is the only one that works in this space, or this space fails as another attempt at capitalism where it wasn't needed or requested.