In addition to all the talk about donations here, it’s worth pointing out that instead of the multi-million dollar infrastructure costs of bigger outfits like Reddit, the costs for running a single Lemmy instance are well within the abilities of many hobbiests. Some may not even ask for donations.

We should keep the developers funded because, as I understand it, this is a full time job for many of them. And I’ve donated to my instance because I don’t think they expected the amount of growth and troubleshooting they’ve have to do with the Reddit surge, but it’s unclear how much will be needed going forward.