Unpopular opinion: the disdain towards for-profit (or even non-profit but monetized) instances is misguided. There is a scale at which running the infrastructure purely on donations stops being feasible, not to mention the moderation problem – at enough scale over a long period of time you either pay good moderators to do their full-time job or have your mods degenerate to reddit and discord levels. No sane person will spend 100% of their free time moderating and not go insane, and "employing" unemployed people that have twice the free time and can use half of it on moderation is exactly how you get reddit mods.

Instances that would for example offer premium accounts / features or even run ads, and therefore be able to financially sustain not only a bigger and highly performant infrastructure and professional mod team but also a full-time dedicated development team working on things normies expect like discovery algorithms, would accumulate the normies, further popularising the fediverse and making it harder for another VC walled garden to swoop in, gather them with shiny features and create another Twitter/Facebook situation.

I'd rather have my IRL friends accessible under some for-profit instance I can interact with from here than on Facebook, thanks. Every time I have to use FB Messenger or FB groups I feel another part of my soul corrupting.