Also, how can we be assured the privacy practices of their subscription/payment platform are at least better than the (likely blockable) trackers?
Forming a financial relationship with a website is, theoretically, infinitely more traceable to your personal identity than all the cookies in the world.
You are naive if you think paying them prevents them from getting more payments by selling your data wherever they can get away with tricking you into consent.
Yeah, lemmy is insanely illogical on this topic. Services cost money to run, and the average user is not going to self host anytime in the foreseeable future. I have yet to hear anybody offer a vision of how things might reasonably work without ads OR subscriptions.
The argument as far as I can tell is "FOSS means I don't have to pay anything because it doesn't cost anything! If they ask for donations they don't mean me"
Not a single one of them have a monthly contribution to their instance though. Guaran-fucking-tee it.
Is € 251.88 the estimated loss in revenue? I would like to say that it only makes sense if you assume the user will be on the platform either way, instead of just not paying and leaving. However, my experience with others makes me believe they will take whatever option to get to what they want.
I think it's a situation for policy but, at least here in the US, our policy makers aren't in the ethical or learned position to be effective.
What I'm saying is, the boat has holes and I'm concerned.