Picturing a nightmare scenario where somehow hexbear gets bought out by capitalists and looks to cash in on some of that sweet enshittification.
De-federating from lemmy would be a start. Strip the site of all the features we gained. Ads would be a must. Paid avatars is another goodie.
I think most employees at social media companies are there just to turn a profit and has nothing to do with the actual product. WhatsApp had 55 employees and scaled to 1 billion users. Instagram had 13 employees when it was acquired for 1 billion dollars
Then every single marketing employee is just for profit, every single salesperson, every single person coding software for the ad delivery network, coding the ad targeting, coding the ad platform infrastructure, all the UX and designers deciding where and how to put the ads, all the management people to coordinate all this stuff, data scientists to maximize user metrics, etc. etc.
This is it. The meat of tech companies' employee bases is always extraneous shit that exists to try and turn a profit; the core functionality of every company I've ever worked for or heard of is almost always <100 engineers.
Yeah, like the core functionality of Twitter or Reddit isn't really any more complicated than Hexbear, it's all scale and ads and security and UX and data mining and ads and ads and ads and ads