I’m fairly new and don’t 100% understand it yet, but instances are run on servers that require money. Are we heading towards seeing ads or subscriptions to raise funds instead of relying on donations to cover overhead?
Especially with the influx of new users. Hardware upgrades are needed.
Email became mostly centralized without any company buying thousands of independent email servers.
The same could (and probably will) happen with other federated services.
Email is a shitshow, but its far from centralized. There are 100s to 1000sof email providers out there.
Self hosting is hard, but not out of the question.