Ask HN: Out of job. Side-project picking up but no reliable income. Help/advice?
For reasons that could warrant another post entirely, I found myself without a (paying) job last week. Now that the dust is settling a bit, I am trying to look at the possible paths going forward.

One possible alternative is for me to give another shot at my long on-again/off-again project - https://communick.com. For those that never had the pleasure of crossing my innumerous shameless plugs about it, here goes another one: communick is a hosting provider for open source social media and messaging. In other words: I take systems like Mastodon, Lemmy, Matrix, XMPP and Pixelfed and I host them for you. If you don't care about having your server and just want a simple/worry-free to join the fediverse, there are also the "flagship" instances where access accounts are subscription based, at a very low price - as low as $0.50/user/month if you commit to a "group" package for 10 accounts.

I started communick in 2019 as a reaction to all the abuses from Facebook and Google. I thought that after watching "The Social Dilemma", more people would be aware of the terrible side-effects of ad-funded businesses and that the only way to align incentives between companies and consumers is by having a simple business model where customers pay directly for the service provided.

Since the end of last year, I am getting some validation. Every week or so I am getting a new paying customer. I've had plenty of people who thought absurd to charge everyone for access, but now accept that most "donation-based" instances are not sustainable. In some ways, things are good and there are some good signals that there is a future here.

The problem though: it's 2023 and the absolute majority of people do not seem to care. We have news media institutions who keep bashing Elon Musk... on Twitter. We have "influencers" with tens of millions of followers who can't even fathom the thought of producing content under their own channel. We have all the small-medium business owners who were convinced of dropping their internet presence and use Facebook instead and now end up paying for the privilege of a small chance of reaching their customers.

The reason that I am writing this post: should I keep hope that communick can ever become a sustainable business? I truly believe that open platforms will eventually win, but I can not take a plunge and keep working on it until they do. For every small win I get (like a customer signing up for a $20/month instance on communick) there are news like "Threads getting 100 million users in 5 days" that completely makes me think that this is hardly ever going to be more than a side/hobby project that it currently is.

I'm willing to take until the end of summer working on it full-time and exploring other ideas adjacent to it, but I can not justify working a lot longer on it without any significant revenue. For those on Mastodon, I also put a series of polls (https://mastodon.communick.com/@raphael/110691138183864904) to see what type of things people are willing to pay for.

Also, I'd gladly consider investors/partnerships, provided they understand that this is not a multi-billion unicorn.