This is going to have to be a per-instance thing. Smaller instances may be fine indefinitely with no donations/outside funding, but large instances will eventually require dedicated hardware or kubernetes clusters to scale adequately. Larger instances absolutely should run funding drives as they need to in order to keep up with their expenses. That, or we get ads on here eventually... which would suck.

Another option would be to do federation-wide fundraising and split it out with crypto or something to instance owners that opt in... take some arbitrary cut for the Lemmy devs and split the rest out to participating instances based on their share of active users or something. But that would need some serious anti-fraud controls to keep a rogue instance owner from creating a ton of local spam accounts to rake in funds.

Like say, old time Quake/CS servers, those info are pretty much not going to be transparent until it's setup and run by a non-profit org. Because, the best they can do is to provide monthly server bills and if they setup account that are dedicated to pay for that bill. Cause otherwise too much personal info is involved, and server owner does not owe you that as well. You either trust the owner from their past performance, or join one that matches your standard. embeded content(img or video use other service) does not consume storage nor bandwidth to the server owners. (PS. malicious owner can always fake reports etc and you will have no way to verify. )

However, I do not know the sharing part works and how that's been handled. Say, lemmy.world have more user and needs to update to other instances more if people subscribe from different instance? I don't know the percentage of incoming traffic compare to out-going and what tier of bandwidth we are talking about renting server wise.

I am in the process of deleting 10 years of comments (thanks, Power Delete Suite!). I'm keeping the account because I need to check in on breaking news and the site is still useful for that. Until they get rid of old.reddit—at which point I'm deleting the account permanently.

And if I'm completely honest, it kind of hurts. My primate brain really enjoyed the dopamine hits when I got complimented, upvoted, and gilded.

I'm getting used to the smaller, more community-focused scope of the Fediverse.

I really like it so far and I love that it theoretically avoids the problems we had with reddit ever arising in the future. I'm a bit worried it might be a bit too complicated for normal users. But I guess we'll have to see. I'm also a bit worried about it from a security perspective, what's stopping someone making a hostile instance or faking a lemmy instance to get people to click malicious links? They can be hosted on any website so you can't really know.

There is a Patreon too if you want to contribute to covering server costs

I consider lemmy.world and startrek.website my "lemmy homes", but, I host my own instance and do most of my interactions via my instance so I don't contribute to overloading lemmy.world.