I don’t think there the “one” model for financial sustainability on the fediverse. Many Mastodon instances already have Patreons etc, some require payment to make an account. So many of these things are fairly established already and can be accomplished in a low tech way without the software having to implement any special features for it.

There’s also been huge waves of spam account attacks on Mastodon recently.

Hobbies seems like a prime cabdidate for splitting up, as that’s fairly broad. From what’s in there tabletop gaming seems like it would have enough communities already to make a topic.

Technology has a lot of android/apple stuff, so maybe that could be either “Smartphones” or “Operating Systems” but that clashes a bit with Linux/Foss. A separate “Hardware” topic might make sense too.

Although, I guess it depends mostly on one’s browsing style. Whether it’s more “quickly skim the content and take a cloaer look at what seems interesting” or a more feed-style consumption.

Personally, I’m not sure I like it that much. The place these kind of layouts are probably most often used are image searches or things where you browse through a lot of stuff to find something. But if you want to look at or scroll through each image individually, having the images next to each other in a non-uniform grid provides a lot of distruction and visual noise imo that makes it harder to focus on the individual image. For me, I think just being able to scroll through each image individually makes for a better experience.