Big P

They used to be good but they’re just PR now

Wear your card in your sleeve like a magician

Yes you are the only person in the entire world who finds it creepy

True, but the amount of instances will probably scale too. You can have premium instances that cost a monthly fee, ones that solicit donations, maybe ones that run ads. But you’ll also always have the passion project instances being ran for a specific community out of the kindness of someone’s heart.

Everything needs to generate some sort of value - I imagine a lemmy instance would generate value for you in the form of learning, or maybe the sense of accomplishment from maintaining a community. That differs from how centralised social media generates value in the form of data or money which is usually at odds with the userbase.