Yep. Web/tech companies generally had an easier time than most dealing with the pandemic, and capitalism, in all its reactionary, short-sighted wisdom, smelled profit and massively over-invested, so companies grew faster than they knew how to handle.

Cut to ~6 months ago and most of them had nothing to show for all of that money (Reddit being a great example - in the time between their massive expansion and now, they only thing they actually added were wildly unpopular NFT avatars). But capitalism demands that profits increase at an increasing rate, so they have to squeeze money from somewhere, which is how we got the massive tech layoffs at the start of the year.

Now they need to find even more ways to increase profits, but many of them are at the point where finding ways to monetize is actually really difficult, so they’re tying to squeeze money out of everything they can find - Reddit’s API changes, Twitter trying to push people towards blue with arbitrary limits, wholesale shuttering of things like Gfycat. Now obviously that’s going to cause a bunch of problems with user trust and retention but who cares about that? That’s a tomorrow problem, and we need profit now!

Capitalism working as intended.

I know nothing technical about how the fediverse works, but I can potentially see a bittorrent-like future for the fediverse, with people contributing spare compute power or bandwidth to the network when they’re online.