Thanks for writing this, Igor. Hard read, but fair discussion to have, still catching up with all conversation...

We agree with the core point: DHF is not "free money." Every proposal has to justify why the value created is greater than the dilution and market pressure it may add, especially when HIVE is at this level.

Small correction on Ecency: the post references the older proposal at 396 HBD/day which was cut to 300 HBD/day after we let go all devs. And the current proposal is 379 at 250 HBD/day now. But your larger point still stands: even 250 HBD/day must be justified clearly, with transparent costs: https://trust.ecency.com.

From our side, the difficult part is that Ecency is not only a frontend. We maintain web, mobile, onboarding, support, open-source SDK/rendering/wallet tooling, image hosting, Hive RPC access, search/indexing, Hivesearcher/Hivesigner/Hivekeeper-related services, and other infrastructure that users and sometimes other apps depend on.

Could we reduce cost by relying more on third-party image hosts, public nodes, and external services? Yes. It would be cheaper for Ecency in the short term. Like many projects on Hive do.

But it would also make Hive more fragile. If too many apps depend on the same few outside services, we create hidden single points of failure. Old images disappear with single failure. Nodes get overloaded. Search and access become dependent on whoever happens to keep infrastructure online.

That is why we see this as public-goods infrastructure, not only an Ecency business expense.

Open source also changes the economics. We keep most of the work public so the community can inspect it, fork it, contribute, or run its own instance. That is good for Hive. But open source does not make servers, bandwidth, monitoring, abuse prevention, support, and maintenance free.

You are also right that revenue matters. We are not against business models. We are actively exploring hive-x402, AI Credits, Points, self-hosted Vision/community instances, and other service-level paths. But we should be honest: none of those currently covers the real cost of operating everything at production scale.

So the question is exactly the one you raised: what does the community want Hive to be?

If Hive wants reliable public infrastructure, easier onboarding, independent frontends, long-term image availability, open-source tooling, and fewer ecosystem-level single points of failure, then some of that has to be treated as shared infrastructure.

If the community does not see enough value in that, that is also an answer. Then projects like ours need to reduce infrastructure, externalize more services, or let the community run more of it directly from the open-source code.

It is just the real tradeoff.

We do this because we still believe Hive can be more than a niche hobby chain. But we agree that every funded team, including us, has to be clearer about cost, revenue paths, measurable value, and what happens if community support is no longer there.

Update: after reading more of this discussion, we published a fuller response here:

@ecency/open-source-does-not-mean

We are reducing the intended ask to 250 HBD/day and adjusting our infrastructure commitments accordingly.

The short version: we hear the concern about DHF pressure in current market conditions. Ecency will keep prioritizing critical open-source infrastructure, web/mobile maintenance, onboarding, image availability, and Hive access, but a smaller ask also means accepting some scaling down, slower development, and harder choices.

We still believe this infrastructure has value for Hive, but the community is right to ask what should be sustained, what should be reduced, and what should move toward revenue or community-run models.