If you take away the traditional ways such a service makes money out of you (advertising, selling your access patterns and data), but still want to run a service, there are still operating costs and startup investment needed to make it work.

So funds have to come from somewhere to pay hosting fees, bandwidth, caching services, legal fees, etc. etc. Getting people to pay for access is one such way. "If you dont' have to pay for the service, you are the product" has the corollary "If you don't want to be the product, you have to pay for the service".

I'm about 4 weeks to 6 weeks away from launching 'https://blewit.net/' along similar principles - no ads, no tracking, no algorithms, no dark patterns. We're going for a Patreon-style funding model, hoping that sufficient people will be incentivised to support an open and transparent foum that doesn't track you.

It's based on reddit, but since I think reddit blew it (the name is a double-pun: blue and blew it), there are some differences - it is primarily text-based but allows other fences (the ```...``` construct) than just code. You can notate music, or see chemical structure, or write maths - real maths, or plot graphs, or ... there's quite a few things you can pull in.