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?
So don’t run large instances. Either selfhost at home if you’re on symmetric fiber or use cheap ARM cloud instances.
Most people aren’t interested in self hosting. It’s a chore to do patch updates. It’s a financial risk to have a cloud instance of some software running that could get hit with unexpected ingress, egress, or cpu charges… and still having to deal with patch updates.
Self hosting Lemmy is as practical as self hosting email for most people.
Its fine if “most” people don’t want to selfhost. In a small instance only 0.1% of the people using it need to do it.