Your concerns are valid but the whole point of fediverse is so that anyone can host their own instances, as with the users are encouraged to sign up different instances instead of a central one so will the cost never be as astronomical as something like Youtube or Reddit and there will not be a catastrophic loss even if a major instance does go down. While I agree admins should be allowed to have donations accepted, I don’t think admins should treat this as a business at the first place.

TL;DR: For a not so huge volume instance, the cost isn’t as high as people would think, I believe the community can sustain itself.

But Lemmy and Kbin can't just "go corporate" because there is no Lemmy LLC with a CEO and shareholders. Lemmy is open source software that a whole bunch of people have been contributing to (although admittedly, I have no idea who's in charge of approving changes, or how that works). But one thing that MIGHT be true (I'm still figuring this out myself) is that if you and I are excellent coders and we know that lemmy 3.0 is nothing but a corporate cash grab, we can just go back to Lemmy 2.99, and Save As... call it Jemmy, and then anybody who follows us is part of our cool new anti-corporate club.

I think, maybe. I'm not actually sure at all.

The biggest corporatization risk I see is that if one instance, like lemmy.jrubal gets SO big and awesome and concentrated that it would be really painful to leave and start over, then whoever operates lemmy.jrubal would have the leverage they need to be greedy, until they make it painful enough that people leave.

It almost feels like it should use tax money to be up and running you know ? Like the government take a tax on everyone and they use this money to help the community run their infrastructure.

Let's use the people's money to build a good social network!