Kinda depressing because it's only a matter of time before it happens with lemmy/kbin. Personally after the way reddit behaved after the API business, I was just happy I could go somewhere away from this corporate anti user atmosphere.

I mean, it's plain obvious you can't run a single service that can handle twitter or reddit levels of users without trying to get some money back. But you can have hundreds, or thousands of hobbyist size instances that spread this load. I think it's a nice escape personally (looking at the traffic my instance gets, I do wonder how this would scale to real reddit numbers though).

But, the majority of people won't think like that (and that's not a criticism), they will go where the people are. Large companies with marketing budgets that are pre-established in social media will get the users.