Having said that, is it really the end of the world if large Lemmy instances have ads to make up for any shortfall in donations? Otherwise, how are large instances expected to be sustainable long term, especially if they’re going to ever reach the kinds of traffic Reddit sees?
I think the solution is not getting large. The Federation is designed for lots of instances that can interact with another. Wikipedia is different, they have centralised servers. If you run an instances you can limit how many accounts you allow.