A standoff between the site and some of its most devoted users exposes an existential dilemma.
One thing that the Reddit guy says that is true, it takes money to run sites. People joining the Fediverse need to realize this and should consider contributing money to their instance if they can.
That’s honestly one thing that I think will be a problem for many Fediverse services and instances. People nowadays are extremely loath to pay for any sort of online content or service. That’s why ads proliferated; nobody wants to pay for eg. news, video streaming or a social network site, and the people producing the content and services need to eat too.
Many have been so conditioned into getting everything for free that they get outright angry when someone suggests that maybe news and social networks are so shit nowadays is exactly because they have to bait people into clicking on stuff so they’ll see more ads, and that maybe they should be paying for the content they consume instead of assuming they’re entitled to it by virtue of being online