I think it will be hard. However I still have junk lemmy will be valuable, successful and fun. At the end of the day though, if lemmy.world or another instance is to reach 3 million subs (for example), that is a lot of costs for the admins. We’d probably need a combination of ads, subscription revenue, or third-party backing. Once investors get involved, then data selling and algorithms get involved.
The way to delay that as long as possible is to guide new users to different instances that are federated to spread the load and costs among all servers and admins.
I would greatly prefer a subscription versus ads or investors. $20-$30 annually for a fun community is very little in the overall scheme of things.