Protocols can be developed and then shared without cost except for the upfront development costs. Hosting a continuous service requires regular income, meaning for profit models will always out-resource non-profit models of hosting. Especially if a platform is looking at hosting more than just text and compressed images. Why do you think Pixelfed’s main host only allows uploads of up to 15MB?

Fediverse is open source and decentralized, so any for-profit model could leverage it without asking for anyone’s permission. There are already for-profit companies that build and maintain apps to access Fediverse platforms. Meta Threads and Tumblr are both integrating into ActivityPub as their own hosts. I imagine in a future where Fediverse grows rampantly, the hosts with the best overall user experience will be for-profit. We live in a world of global capitalism, good things cost money most of the time.

maybe they should need to maintain a certain percentage of high pop instances that federate with them. Basically establishing a standard of trust.

“At least 80% of instances with over 1,000 active users must federate with you to be a Lemmy starter instance.”

This guarantees that new users will see the majority of content, and the starter instances won’t be embroiled in federation wars. The % value and pop numbers can change to reduce it down to a manageable number of starter instances.