As others have already said ... donations.

Something to keep in mind though is how cheap per user this whole thing can be.

Here's the admin of mastodon.world and lemmy.world outlining their financials: https://blog.mastodon.world/april-and-may-2023-financial-update

They're actually making money off of donations.

And if you look at the monthly costs (~500 Euro / month) and their Monthly Active Users (~35k), that turns out to be ~0.2 Euro per year. Without a need for profits, marketing, bloated features etc, the actual cost of social media per user per year is something we'd all be willing to pay (IMO).

Now obviously there aren't salaries in that calculation. Moderation, admin-ing etc are all done voluntarily AFAIK, just like sub-reddit mods were on Reddit. Though, again, if someone wants moderating/admin-ing to be a side hustle of some sort, we all don't need to donate much for there to be actual livable salaries (or supplementary salaries) in this kind of work. In fact, I think it'd be cool if social media went in that direction where organising popular and nice community spaces was just a thing you could do for a living with the skill and talent it requires being of recognised value.

Lemmy.world, as an instance, has 7 admins and 25k Monthly Active Users. If each donated $5 per year, that's ~17k per year for each admin. Not a full salary, but maybe not bad for a part-time side hustle!

Yup, paid for by donations 😊 server requirements aren't super high since it's primarily functioning as link aggregation and doesn't have to host a lot per server.

I have an onlyfans for my feet pics that finances all of it

Yes most intances are paid by donations. Mostly the admins are paying their bills

You like your instance and want to give something back? Donate 🌞

Just throw $2 a month toward Lemmy on Patreon! Well worth it.

In addition to all the talk about donations here, it's worth pointing out that instead of the multi-million dollar infrastructure costs of bigger outfits like Reddit, the costs for running a single Lemmy instance are well within the abilities of many hobbiests. Some may not even ask for donations.

We should keep the developers funded because, as I understand it, this is a full time job for many of them. And I've donated to my instance because I don't think they expected the amount of growth and troubleshooting they've have to do with the Reddit surge, but it's unclear how much will be needed going forward.

I'm donating $5 to mastodonworld and $5 to the lemmy devs per month. It's not much, but at least I'm not the product.