Reddit migrator here (shocking, I know)
Just wondering because I found out about all this yesterday and just realized the ammount of independent servers, but no sign of any ads or sponsors. So… is it all based on donations?
Also don’t just lurk, if you know you should answer because lemmy only counts users who posted or commented as active users.
Its up to individual instances and apps to decide how to keep themselves running and its up to the users that form around those instances to decide if they like that chosen form, eg donations, subscriptions, advertisements The benefits for users being they can just move somewhere else if they don’t like their choice The difficulty for server hosts will be keeping up with demand and being able to afford to continue
Unfortunately this means that the instance you have chosen right now might not be here forever