Kbin.social was my first too, Ernest was a king and I hope he’s doing well and thriving in life.
Made a handful of alts when it became clear kbin was going away. Ended up using .zip as my main as I like their hands-off approach to moderating/defederation. We’re federated with everyone except malicious/criminal instances by default. If you don’t want to see things you need to block them yourself which I like a lot.
This kind of stuff is the coolest thing about the fediverse and ActivityPub to me.
All the things you mentioned are possible in theory but the tools and infrastructure to do it haven’t been created.
You can already see them positioning themselves to start removing features with the phrase “free plan.”
Nothing stopping them from limiting the number of passwords available in “the free plan” or something, pressuring users into “the pay plan.”
But I’m pretty cynical.
Lol, websites are born and die constantly. Nobody knows what the next big thing will be but reddit will definitely die within our lifetime.
Remember MySpace? How about Friendster?