Maybe this is the syndicalist in me talking, but I think the problem is entirely pretending that Lemmy moderators and admins are and should be expected to work for free. It's just too much work, too much daily upkeep, to reasonably expect to be handled by a volunteer labor force forever.

That's obviously a whole other drama with FOSS as a whole but there's simply a different level of labor and difficulty inherent to running a large internet community than making a program and dumping it on a download site.