You are not an user/customer but you want to change the project? That's definitely not a fair warning, you are being completely unreasonable and should spend your time better in place of smearing other people's work with baseless accusations. People like you kill others motivation to do good for others for some kind of sadistic pleasure
I was a user. They're not baseless accusations, they're statements of technical fact and a statement of ethical belief. I don't believe it's right to deny users (including non-business users like myself) a capability that costs peanuts to run as a strong-arming tactic to get them to pay. I know exactly what I'm critiquing and why.
I'm not going to source-build and force a community of folks to source-build an APK to access an essential technical capability of a messaging app. Zulip is essentially rendered as useless in such a case. That is wrong and unethical.
Zulip's notifications service is free for community use, as well as business use up to 10 users. If you're not a business, why would you need to build a fork? Just spend 5 minutes filling out the brief community plan form and you're all set.
I can't say that the mobile notifications model is perfect. I have my frustrations with it. One of them that might not be obvious is that various military/government installations on airgapped networks are all freeriding.
Alternative options are (1) having no meaningful monetization of self-hosting or (2) moving away from being fully FOSS.
