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Thing is, most people don't want to pay for services that to them seemed to be free since forever. And this creates collective social pressure to follow suit. Nothing a big company offers is ever free. You're just paying in alternate currency.
Screw em companies, only Lemmy devs get my money.
It's also reasonable to donate to your instance admin (although in your case for lemmy.ml, that's the same people).
It's gross though. Say you started to pay, they would still force ads into their product because they're greedy and demanding more money. We're seeing this with streaming sites now.
The funny thing is with youtube, for example, I am a premium user. I deactivated all tracking of my habits on there. Now I am greeted, as a homepage, with nothing else than a call to action to reactivate said tracking. As a paying customer I see less (as in none at all) content on the homepage than an anonymous user would. I am subbed to 170+ channels. Yet they tell me they cannot come up with suggestions unless they can track my every step on their platform. sus. And when saying funny I mean extremely aggravating.
Well...Twitter is trying it.