AGPL is not enough to prevent someone providing competing hosting options. They'd need to provide code if they make changes, but competitors are still free to offer the exact same service and not spend anything in development, which reduces the viability of the original project if hosting was the supposed source of income.

So the original project wants to restrict user freedoms, i.e. they _do not_ want the project to be open source; it's a legit choice, even if I personally prefer free software.