I agree, and I think this model - centralized democratic open source server for most people + self-hosted version when you need it - is ideal. Without the cent

I agree, and I think this model - centralized democratic open source server for most people + self-hosted version when you need it - is ideal. Without the centralized server somebody will take over with a proprietary walled garden that offers better user experience. Without the self-hosted version people with special use-cases will move to proprietary competition that will eventually distrupt the democratic well meaning version. Most recently I've seen it play out in virtual tabletop rpgs space. There is the proprietary centralized roll20.com that barely works because for the longest time it had no competition. Some of the premium features were broken for months. And there's foundry vtt which is much better, open source and self-hosted, but is hard to setup correctly on your own. What's missing is centralized democratic version of foundry vtt that will make it as easy as roll20 for new players and DMs. It's not like money is the problem - people in this hobby are used to pay for customized dies, figurines, books, maps etc. They could easily charge 100 USD a year for 4-5 person group and that will easily pay for the computing needed and bandwidth. Both of the groups in which I play chipped in for cloud server and a license of foundry no problem. The problem was configuring it and dealing with network issues.