From the article:
"Moving to the Fediverse
This tension between these communities and their host have, again, fueled more interest in the Fediverse as a decentralized refuge. A social network built on an open protocol can afford some host-agnosticism, and allow communities to persist even if individual hosts fail or start to abuse their power. Unfortunately, discussions of Reddit-like fediverse services Lemmy and Kbin on Reddit were colored by paranoia after the company banned users and subreddits related to these projects (reportedly due to “spam”). While these accounts and subreddits have been reinstated, the potential for censorship around such projects has made a Reddit exodus feel more urgently necessary, as we saw last fall when Twitter cracked down on discussions of its Fediverse-alternative, Mastodon."
Because their intent is to force people to use their native applications. They’re intentionally making it difficult/impossible for third party apps to exist. They’re wagering that their clout surpasses the bad-will they’ll get for the crummy move.
Then they can bombard everyone with “he gets you” ads or whatever the most recent ad garbage is, and get their full revenue.
The high pricetag provides the failed venere ‘if every user paid the fair cost of X monthly, you can use our api’ in an attempt to limit said bad-will from the community.