Server owners aren't doing this for free. They are doing it at cost. Some of them quite a bit. I genuinely can't see how you can sincerely equate someone paying thousands of dollars a month to host the infrastructure of Lemmy itself as someone designing a CSS theme in their free time for something that wouldn't exist without the mentioned instance owners. These aren't the same. And this is the first form of mainstream monetization to hit Lemmy at any level past donations and it's aggressive. Childish reply. Someone posting content is not spending a dime but them posting that cost the server hosters one.