There's no business platform here. So it will go a different path. Buy eventually the mods and instance admins who are volunteering their time and money to keep this going will wish to spend their time and money elsewhere. What happens after the first round of people who really work to make a free platform like this succeed go away? If there's not a good deal of planning and acculturation for new people, there's a high likelihood that a second generation of mods takes over who have different motives and reasons for running the place and the platform sees noticeable changes. Or nobody steps up at all and individual sections just end.

I guess google will just have to suck less if they want us to keep using it.

I’m not sure what to think about the price. I can’t really imagine life without a search engine, even though I was alive for a couple of decades before search engines existed. I pay $400/month for my car, but my search engine arguably gives me more value (I am lucky not to need to drive a lot). I wouldn’t pay $400/month for a search engine. But $5-10 to have a degree of freedom from the tracking and results that aren’t just trying to get my money? I am intrigued.