There's still the corporate pressure from the host. I assume most people wouldn't be hosting Lemmy from their home for bandwidth/uptime reasons. Its hard to find a truly bulletproof VPS anymore. And they aren't cheap. With the VPS and storage you could be looking at $60-100 out of pocket.

Mine runs me around $55 a month and I have to rely on daily backups since it could be shut down with enough pressure.

Someone has to pay for this, which I imagine will be a problem eventually. I run mine for my own personal use, then I open the instances up with whatever resources I have left over. But if I was running an instance of 10,000+ users, I wouldn't be able to afford that.

I've seen the same issue with many many piracy communities. They start of great with lots of helpful information. But the more they grow the more diluted they become, and also have to worry about legal action after a time so they have to start enforcing rules to protect them selves. Such as not providing links.

It'll be a very sad day when those no longer work.