Money is the measure of success to a business. It's what they exist for, at least under capitalism.
They'll hold the very idea of community ransom. They'll do it in virtual spaces, and they'll do it in meatspaces. And they won't stop unless it's proven to be deeply unprofitable.
Perhaps I've misunderstood what ernest said here, but this is straight from him:
Kbin started as a fork of Lemmy at the very beginning
It's not lemmy.
kbin began as a fork of Lemmy a while ago, but it's been overhauled into it's totally own thing.
It's interoperable with Lemmy, though. Like lemmy, it's a content aggregator, and kbin users can subscribe to lemmy communities (and Lemmy users can subscribe to kbin communities), but kbin communities (called "magazines") have some extra bells and whistles, most notably the ability to also bring in microblog posts that contain mod defined keywords or hashtags. This means you can also see what people are saying on Mastodon (or Calckey, or Misskey, or Akkoma, or...) about the topics the magazine focuses on.
There are a lot of interoperable website engines out here in the fediverse. Aside from kbin interoperability:
Mastodon users can follow lemmy communities and comment on lemmy posts.
Lemmy users can subscribe to PeerTube channels (check out, a random example I dug up, !techlore@neat.tube or enter 'https://neat.tube/c/techlore/videos' into your instance's search bar to fetch it, if it's not available on your instance yet; that's a PeerTube channel, not a Lemmy community).
Lemmy users can also view and interact with Frierndica groups (and vice versa; check out !fediversenews@venera.social, which is a Friendica group).
Edit: See below.
It stems from the fact that lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml cofederate, that the project leads are communists, and the claim that lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml off of the same IP address.
The first two points are not in contention, but I haven't, personally, been able to verify the third.
Now, lemmygrad is absolutely a trollish, auth-left hellscape. And I say that with... well, not respect, but not specific derision, either. That genuinely seems to be the aesthetic they're going for. They're not here to make friends with anyone but themselves, and they'll play apologetics for China, North Korea, and Stalin's takeover of the Soviet Republic all day long.
But even if the project leads are genuinely involved in that, it doesn't really change the fact that the project is not inextricably tied to them. It's an open source project. It can be forked, and forked again. No one actually needs lemmygrad or lemmy.ml. Or lemmy, for that matter. Everyone can hop over to kbin or Friendica and still access all of the same communities.
Shit, they're accessible from Mastodon and Calckey.
And besides, it's not like people avoid using software when it's made by white supremacist capitalist techbros. In those cases, we all basically just go "yeah, but I'm not a white supremacist capitalist techbro" and carry on with our day. And those products generally can't be wrenched from their control or oversight.
Most people chose Elon over learning that multiple websites exist...
Full and mutual interoperability just means everything develops toward the same feature sets, which probably isn't what we want.
Core features should always be interopable, of course, but we don't want to box developers in.
I believe kbin allows you to do this, but not Lemmy. Lemmy seems to be very focused on the communities aspect of things.
If both a group-centric UI as well as the ability to follow microblogging users is important to you, consider checking out kbin.social.
A big issue there has also been single-user admin/mod teams. Running a site of several thousand active users is not something just one or two people can do, especially when you also have to screen remote content that's streaming in.
You can always shut down user registrations if the server's reaching the point of financial sustainability.