At the moment of writing this there are 90 comments, none of them even considering the idea that this whole Fediverse thing is never going to be a worthy contender for a healthier Internet if we keep treating it as some hippie, amateur, “community is all you need” project.
“You get what you pay for” is still true. If the thousands of people using kbin contributed with $10/year, you can bet that the developer wouldn’t be in this situation.
We might come up with all the schemes to try to mitigate the issues and warts of federated software, but it would help a lot more if most people understood that software developers and instance admins are still professionals who still have ambitions and would like to be paid for their work accordingly.