Monetization as in, paying for the cost of the servers and bandwidth... You people think everything is free?

It needs to have some kind of monetization. More like voluntary buy-in. Maybe the web 3.0 could fix some of the money problem here. NFT as skin or avatar, some coin or medal to give others. A portion of the sale could go towards maintenance cost and whatnot

My post was being more ironic and sarcastic. You explain and nuanced it well in your post. I think people can't read between the lines sometimes.

12 millions users? Really?! Couting Mastodon in I guess, so all of fediverse. That's amazing.

Because you can't have an open api while serving legit user and bot. The bot will eat your future snack of exploiting the data they're amassing. So you end up having some limitation to block the bots to some extend.