I’m actually having a very difficult time thinking of something that’s priced strictly based on the time+enjoyment metric without factoring labour+material

Just to be clear I think at a base level labour and material should still be taken into an account. The problem right now is these apps are essentially warring over your attention and in order to do so are hacking our ape brains. Now this isn't necessarily a bad thing, that relationship can be somewhat symbiotic, we get entertainment they get ad revenue. However the situations gotten dire as they need to drive profits up and steal attention from each other and instead of innovating and progressing their platform they're maliciously implementing ways to keep you on their platform. We need to swap to a system that's revolved around our money being spent where our enjoyment is at. This negates malicious ad revenue driven profits and might actually drive an era of innovation across big tech which hasn't happened since the early 2010's.

When talking directly about the fediverse, sure the devs love working on lemmy, but for how long. Quite frankly nobody will agree but we should be paying them to work on it as we should be paying instance admins in some capacity. This is an ad free experience we should really put our money where our mouth (enjoyment) is.