This is an interesting conundrum, actually. The big question at its core being:

Can you ever do enough good through philanthropy, so that it offsets the damage you had to do, in order to become a billionaire? Can even all the billionaires in the world do enough good with their money, to offset the damage done by a system, that allowed for them to become billionaires?

I, personally, don’t think it is possible.

To give an actual answer: I think, the world would definitely be better, but unless those billionaires collectively used all the power their money provides, to do away with money and the possibility of billionaires altogether, I don’t think it would amount to all that much.

To anyone not wanting to give on Patreon, there is also: https://liberapay.com/PieFed/

All things considered, it’s not yet falling off as quickly as I would have expected, maybe my memory is playing tricks on me, but I seem to remember Lemmy had a harder crash after the first reddit exodus, as did mastodon several times, when people fled xitter.

the sole dev of both of these apps doesn’t think he needs any help and refuses to open source them.

Oof, that sucks. Seems like someone else needs to create an open source alternative app. The platforms themselves are libre software, right? I couldn’t find a lot for loops on that, but Pixelfed itself seems to be.

Perfect moment to plug !Peertube@lemmy.world

Growing steadily, and in my opinion, definitely a way to supplement (still far from replace) YT. There’s actually some neat content on there by now, from just good to fascinatingly bizarre - but almost always very genuine and authentic. Especially when comparing to some years back, it really has become a proper seed for a platform instead of a novel experiment - but more people interacting with the content and/or supporting the creators would be amazing as the next step.