My argument was that monetary compensation of some form would drive participation, and that participation could take the form of simple things like ads all the way to developers coding lemmy instances to accept ads and other preferred features desired by corporations like user tracking, algorithms to place preferred posts, communities and/or users at the top of views, etc... Make the software free and give instance operators a cut of any revenue, and bam, EEE wins. Way too easy, the burden of running the instances falls on the operator and with some nice EULA wording, probably the liability as well.

Of course, that hypothetical scenario hinges on corporations finding the lemmyverse worthwhile to exploit, which hopefully won't happen.