They do have a profit motive, because meta is in competition with lemmy for people’s time and attention. The more attention/time/views meta gets, the better for them. So it is in their interest to find a way to create their own instance, make it the most popular one, and then use that popularity to shut out all other instances, effectively killing them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish