Some of the people in the space are tired of panhandling, and would like to actually get paid for things they do. This can include: covering monthly instance costs, selling subscriptions to premium articles for a newspaper, supporting a video creator on PeerTube, or donating to an open source project. A subscription system is one way of doing that.
Seconded. Commercialism and monetizing everything is what caused the www to rot. We don't need it here. Neoliberalism has already robbed generations of the right to simply exist or create without a profit motive, among other things, like literacy. Pretty sick of it.