It works for wikipedia, and that's a big, monolithic organization. The distributed nature of Lemmy makes it more possible to run off donations, because individual instances are smaller and require less exotic hardware. They don't have to store the entire corpus of Lemmy content, etc, etc. Smaller instances means less human resources and attendant management. I think most of these instances are still run by volunteers as passion projects.

I don't think that will work as instances start getting to the million user mark. 10M... I'm interested to see 1) if Lemmy actually gets that big and 2) if users condense on one or a handful of super-instances or some other form of organization develops.

I can imagine, for example, Electronic Arts starting their own instance for arms-length game sites that might attract a large swath of people, or Nikon sponsoring an instance that specializes in photography and imaging-related communities.