There’s no contradiction. It’s just a free market. Reddit charged an absurd amount for their API and offered an inferior product as the only alternative. So people left.

If a Lemmy instance wants to charge for access or serve ads, that’s fine too. But they better have some competitive advantage or people will leave for an instance that doesn’t do that.

Another difference between Reddit and Sync is the scale. I support my local coffee shop over Starbucks for the same reason.

Funny how no one expects a coffee shop to run on donations.