Paid application hosting is certainly a reasonable option. The issue is that the people who can comfortably pay probably already are.
F4L and FurNation have thousands of members. They can drum up $25/month among their administrators, let alone the users. It's the places that have a few tens of members that may find it difficult – the same people who would probably have difficulty arranging hosting of their own and building or buying networking software.
Perhaps this is how it should be – arguably, well-supported networks are most likely to be a success – but it leads to disparity in who can start up a network. It'll be interesting to see what plans are offered.
Paid application hosting is certainly a reasonable option. The issue is that the people who can comfortably pay probably already are.
F4L and FurNation have thousands of members. They can drum up $25/month among their administrators, let alone the users. It's the places that have a few tens of members that may find it difficult – the same people who would probably have difficulty arranging hosting of their own and building or buying networking software.
Perhaps this is how it should be – arguably, well-supported networks are most likely to be a success – but it leads to disparity in who can start up a network. It'll be interesting to see what plans are offered.