YouTube was founded by 3 former PayPal employees and bought by Google for $1.65 billion just over a year after its creation. It launched its partner program in 2007 which is when people could start directly making money from the site - but for most big people on the platform, making money was the eventual goal anyway. There was always a plan for YouTube to make oodles of cash and for people to make money making videos on it.

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.