I prefer good faith discussions please. I love the Fediverse and love what it can be long term. The problem is that parts of the culture want nothing to do with financial aspect. Many are opposed to ads, memberships, sponsorships etc The “small instances” response does nothing to positively contribute to the conversation. There are already massive instances and not everyone wants to self host. People are concerned with larger companies coming to the Fedi but these beliefs will drive everyday users to those instances. People don’t like feeling disposable and when you hamstring admins who then ultimately shut down their instances that’s exactly how people end up feeling. There has to be an ethical way of going about this. So many people were too hard just to be told “too bad” “small instances” I don’t want to end up with a Fediverse ran by corporations because they can provide stability.
Google is known for cutting free services when there is no direct revenue from the users and it was not profitable on its own. You are making my argument for me here.
Every popular FOSS product has either received itself investment from some corporation which wanted to profit from it, or it was financed by some large group who wanted to commoditize their complements.
“This far” in relation to what? Are you hoping to have the Fediverse as a viable alternative to everyone or are you feeling satisfied because it fulfills the needs of small niche? Do you want Lemmy to be like Linux, or do you want it to be like *BSD?