This never worked so far in the past, but maybe you have some secret sauce that you did not explain above.
There existed FOSS service providers
- in times with much stronger economy,
- with much less global disturbances,
- originating from a wealthy country where members are supposed to be able to afford anything,
- offering a wide palette of services including email, expensive chat platforms, storage, website, shells and more,
- all they requested is a minimum donation of $1/year and even that was possible to be waived away on request if the member was facing temporary hardship.
They still went bankrupt after a couple of years due to a too low amount of active users and high churn.
I’m also not sure how a chatmail service provide would differentiate themselves from the hundreds of other existing nodes. What could they offer that would make switching to them worthwhile?