The rabid “it should be free” crowd here acts like we live in a post scarcity utopia where everything is roses and they deserve whatever they like on demand. The majority of users on this site wouldn’t give a penny to help save their instance from dying.
Reality is that FOSS is basically never given donations (donate to your instance hosts people) and relying on donations is a guarantee that you’ll run a charity at a loss.
Software development is hard work that only a small group of people know how to do (for now: I still hope it’s like 50% of the population in the future but…) And to make independent software full time is a risky endeavor.
You’d have to be off your fucking gord to make FOSS software full time and expect to stay above the poverty line.
Good on you for supporting Sync and Lemmy. I do the same and plan to continue doing so… Cause I want the bad place to Digg it’s own grave with their greed. But that’ll only happen if we’re crowd funding our FOSS.