It seems that for a large Lemmy instance to be sustainabile long term (especially at the level of traffic reddit sees) it requires ads and/or raising enough donations like Wikipedia https://sh.itjust.works/post/1948942
No advertisements. Period. Donations should be enough, especially if instances remain small like they are intended to. The federated internet is not about becoming reddit, which many people misunderstand. It's supposed to be something different, and one of the keys to that difference is avoiding corporate interests driving the site. Advertisements kill that instantly. If you want ads, go use meta shit.
Keep in mind that with the way the ActivityPub protocol was designed, more small instances end up taking up more resources and are more costly to run overall than larger ones.
Resource requirements scale with number of instances, not number of users.
