You’re not wrong, I don’t know why people are downvoting you.

Somehow they believe the wages paid in the US is normalized everywhere else.

Some senior developers in the EU for example make a salary of ~60k euro. Which roughly translate to 30 hourly.

Not to mention third world country where all these Corporations outsource their work.

Mind you OP asked about a open source project and not a scaled enterprise software

It’s good to experience the different cultures of life, society and societal structures have not always been around. We have primitive desire to explore and understand as humans

The economics of a social platform relies on growth over time and Lemmy is growing at the perfect pace because it’s not a single entity but a collaborative entity.

Once bigger federations break through to the mainstream market you’ll see the relevance of smaller federations growing along with it as it becomes a ‘bigger’ ecosystem

Mentioned in the comment section below what is necessary for community growth and it doesn’t require millions, only a few hundred active members.

Agreeing with this individual. The US has been an oligarchy for a while and late President Carter said it himself “It violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. And the same thing applies to governors and U.S. senators and congress members. So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election’s over. … The incumbents, Democrats and Republicans, look upon this unlimited money as a great benefit to themselves. Somebody’s who’s already in Congress has a lot more to sell to an avid contributor than somebody who’s just a challenger.”

Most are wanting an end to this current system so they’ll ‘play’ it out knowing albeit the struggle, Democracy has left the building and late stage capitalism is showing the disparity of the predators and preys of society