Deciding to pass on a service that asks you money to offer you a service is completely fine, as long as you don't later complain about "privacy issues" and "massive surveillance".
https://github.com/tootsuite/documentation/blob/master/Runni...
It's not necessary for everyone to pay if the topology is right. They could have joined the growing ActivityPub fediverse and set up a managed hosting thing the way one of the major Mastodon contributors did.
The centralized sites spend much of their money on marketing and making ad deals. You don't need that if the social network is a standard feature you bolt your software on to and don't depend on ads.
But yeah, everyone will still be subject to the government showing up and going through your data if they deem it necessary. I'm not sure that can be helped? If there's an ironclad way to do that, I haven't seen it done.
Another option would be to have voluntary donations, like wikipedia.
I'm not going to pay $10/month for a curated new feed which I can do myself for free, and probably do a better job of it.
paying in kind is still a valid form of payment