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.
The short answer is it really isn’t profitable, and will be hard to ever be profitable simply because of how it is indeed run by donations.
Being able to spread the load over many independent instances does help to spread that load.