Moreover, I am on a large instance (social.coop) and living happily -- I pay a monthly fee and I'm confident it'll last pretty much forever (they also have a go

Moreover, I am on a large instance (social.coop) and living happily -- I pay a monthly fee and I'm confident it'll last pretty much forever (they also have a governance plan, which I find important!). I also support mastodon itself. Given the number of large servers that are financially healthy, [1] I don't expect this trend to break so soon. Given this voluntary nature however, I think the devs might be underestimating the importance of low running costs... but at scale I'm sure efficiency will improve (in the last case through alternative servers!). I'm more genuinely worried about Mastodon and other parts of Fediverse forgetting why they were made in the first place. They are made as a network for the users, not for selling ads. They can make every decision with the users wellbeing in mind and this is incredibly powerful in today's world. (if they stick to that, I'm sure they'll find a lot of success) Selling out as the author seems to suggest would make them into a boring Twitter clone as far as I can tell. [1] not only mastodon.social, also others like mstdn.social, fosstodon.org, and more -- if not, check with your instance maintainer :)