@rysiek All I know about Ello is that I heard people talk about it who had never heard of StatusNet or GNU social and I was like "dude, wtf?" and tried to spread the gospel of federation to deaf ears.

But did Ello try to do the explicit payments deal, like with App.net? To avoid having to track and abuse users to financially survive the centralised horsepowers needed to run the servers if it were to scale?