Can we stop with accusing people with working for corporations and treating them as representative of that corporation just for the purpose of appealing to emotion and making the other person sound worse? It doesn’t even make much sense. Lemmy is too small for corporations to spend money to astroturf.
The only thing you manage to do is make Lemmy more toxic and unappealing to spend time on.
For the use case of encrypting your traffic while using a public WiFi, both commercial VPNs and self-hosted ones provide the same functionality.