It's not greedy to want to at least run net neutral, though. I assumed that's how reddit operated for the most part until now. But I'm here because it does seem like the new UI design etc are more targeted at growth and making the platform more attractive to sell. But at the end of the day, it doesn't matter how much community engagement you have, a platform can only exist so long with negative profits.

It's no different for lemmy instances. How many lemmy users pay so their server can be maintained? Not many I would guess. And I predict the influx of reddit users will cause many instances to lock down new user signups due to lack of resources to moderate them. The ones that don't lock down will be asking for donations, selling ad space, or in the worst case, selling user data.

The upside is that a lemmy server can die without the whole platform dying, but revenue needs to be generated somehow for a lemmy instance to continue to exist. Whether it's generated from the server itself, or from the wallet of a generous person, it has to happen.