No. Elitists are the ones who are elitists. They just chose FOSS as their high horse to be holier than though. To beat the vegan horse I'm going to use Linux users as an example.
Anytime anyone irl talks about Linux it's not really about how great Linux has met their needs. It's usually about how great it is that it isn't windows.
It's the reason lemmy is struggling, it's mainly Linux gatekeepers and foss elitists. Along with lemmy needing a slight learning period, the community just spews toxic shit relentlessly.
He also has always asked and worked with his community for what they want. I've been on Sync since 2014 and have nothing tying me to it, but the fact when I had issues he responded personally and got it fixed, really made an impression. I remember back when he took a break for a couple years to work on his degree, he came back swinging hard on this project.
I'll gladly leave the app if it ever doesn't have my interests in mind. However that time has not yet arrived.
Most of us come from the reddit app, it just has a clean and good setup with great settings. The subscription is mostly to support LJD, on Reddit it allowed for cloud backups of settings and reddit specific features.