The way I see it, FOSS is like a public option. It's very important to provide a baseline functionally that paid apps need to exceed to be competitive. That's a great thing, but that doesn't mean it's wrong for paid apps to exist that provide a more polished experience, and if you can't afford it, the ads really aren't that intrusive, but if they annoy too much you can just use FOSS.

What's great about Lenny is that this choice cannot be taken away from us. There will always be competition both FOSS and paid because lemmy is an open platform and healthy competition is a great thing.