In many ways, Mastodon feels like rewinding the clock on social media back to the early days of Twitter and Facebook. On the consume side, that means that your home feed has no algorithm (this can be disorienting at first).
Practically, it means that you see only what you want to see and only see it linearly. You never wonder “why am I seeing this and how do I make it go away?”. Content can only enter your home feed via your followed tags or handles and the feed is linear like the early days of social media.
You are currently using full fledged software projects that are free to use for anyone in the form of Lemmy and the ActivityPub protocol.
(Disclaimer: I am not opposed to developers funding their projects with ads or paid subscriptions or whatever. Just pointing out that it is possible to work with passion (and optional donations) alone.)
Edit: Nvm, just realised you’re not OP
Lemmy has gotten quite a bit of money in grants. It’s safe to say that without the grants allowing the lemmy devs to work on it full time, it wouldn’t be as functional as it is now. Getting grants really isn’t easy and that shouldn’t be the barrier to whether or not you can be compensated for your work.