Let‘s assume its true: those were so much healthier times. Covid was not heard of yet, Twitter was still Twitter. Today it‘s normality that AIs are making the decision if you work here or not (certainly deciding during recruting if your CV is forwarded, maybe also for firing by DOGE). It‘s normality that AIs decide if your content on your cloud account should trigger criminal investigation and closing your account for good. Anyway most big companies are not reachable by a customer anymore (in order to contact a real person). They have grown providing services to (and taking money from) way too many users, but paying way too few employees to handle it.

My personal opinion is that any company should be allowed to grow (by customer base) only to a size, where they can still handle customer contacts by real persons. If their product is working flawlessly it causes fewer needed customer contacts, so fewer employees can handle it. On the other hand, if the product is shit, more customer contact employees must be hired relative to customer base.

From my POV not only „free of adds and tracking“ are important to underline. Also „free of political and commercial pressure“ is key, from my POV this is the most important, especially in the current political climate. I know this is not directly a reason why donations are needed, like the others are. But for someone to decide about a donation this is a very important reason to throw money in.