My point is that if I am to be in al “alternative” economy is not to make rich a cool San Francisco dude instead of Jeff Bezos,

That is the perfect display of crab mentality that is so prevalent in the Fediverse.

We’re talking about one guy that is building a service that is 100% FOSS, and who currently has (according to the article) 300 musicians on the platform. Even if them all become paying subscribers, we are talking about something on the order of $3000/month. No one is going to become a “rich dude in San Francisco” because of that.

Even if he gets 10 times as many people paying, we are still talking about income that is less than what a senior developer would be making by slinging code at Big Tech. And if he got to the point where there that many people using his service, you can bet that would also mean more competition in the space. With the difference that no one would be able to build a monopoly around it because the service is FOSS and built on top of open protocols.

Voluntary donations are more than enough to keep it on float.

“Keeping it afloat” is not the same as “thriving”. The Lemmy developers have made this their full-time job, but they could be making more money by doing deliveries by bike than what they get by donations. This is pathetically little for all the value that they have produced. There is so much potential in the Fediverse, yet we don’t get to realize 1% of it because people like you keep this silly idea that an “alternative” economy is only fair if everyone is piss-poor broken.