The joke/truth is that users are willing to pay for good services and good products. Spez could have had a cut of either of those but actively chose not to via the way things were handled.
Is there a way to have like mail where I can have control of my domain, so my user@domain is completely mine and I can always use it even if instances go down as I have control over it. But without having a full Lemmy instance?
Some basic thing which does the minimum to validate my user and maybe store my subs and stuff like that but not storing anything from other instances etc...
Of course the content I wrote, send etc to other instances that went down it would be lost but you get the idea, be able to keep the identity.
Although storing my own comments and posts would be nice but not needed.
Or something similar to mail, were I currently can have my domain but I simply set the MX records to some third-party so they handle the annoying part of mail and I simply own the mail@domain.