Saying it as the person in charge of developing Mastodon, probably the most likely reason more servers don't charge for access is that it's not built into the software, so it would require either customizing the code or manually sending out invites based on external payments (e.g. Patreon, some servers actually do that). I would imagine the other likely reason is that complexity of signing up as a business with your local tax office, charging the right taxes based on where the customers are located, and accounting. I do absolutely agree that paying for your account would make running the servers so much more sustainable.
I doubt that any SaaS pays taxes based on where the users are located, so the only burden is in setting up the business in the first place. In any case, projects like open collective could help to manage fiscal issues.
For smaller instances, I really have a hard time seeing tax authorities going after people because they decided to host a server and ask a total of $100-$1000 per year from a few dozen people.
Lastly, perhaps if you weren't so biased against crypto, you'd realize that this is one actual valid use case for it?
The US has complicated state-by-state rules for who has to pay sales taxes and when. Other places seem to mostly have something like VAT with varying rules. One benefit of Patreon is they handle all this for you.
One of McAfee's last scams before he died was pushing a "crypto-based social network" that was just a poorly reskinned Mastodon called Hiveway.[0] It was 100% BS and didn't even bother to turn off federation. Hilarity ensued. There's nothing stopping someone from legitimately adding crypto support to it.
I am not even talking about adding crypto into the network protocol - which I agree is not needed unless you are an ideologue. What I am saying is that smaller instances (from tens to low hundreds of users) could accept crypto for payments and use that to fund its maintenance.
Yeah, you could do it with regular payment processors as well, but with crypto you could not only avoid the fees from micropayments (layer-2 solutions already exist and allow fast and cheap transfers) but most importantly you could run these instances without dealing with bureaucracy. No taxman will come after you because you are getting a few hundred bucks per month.
