Infosec.Exchange, Infosec.Pub, and Fedia.io (and all other Fedi projects run by Jerry) are funded by donations too. AFAIK, it is working well for the moment.

Exactly. My instance is run by a normal guy. I mean, he’s a Chief Information Security Officer and none of those guys are REALLY normal, but still.

I don’t believe it’s frowned upon. I have one here on infosec.pub and another on fedia.io. I primarily use infosec.pub though

If you’re willing to do the full VPS route like it seems, check out Hetzner. In my experience, it has higher resources at a lower cost than other providers like DO.

If something like multi-reddit comes about in Lemmy, I believe it could solve that issue. Just make a multi-reddit of what is the same community (roughly) over multiple servers. It won’t solve the problem of duplicate posts though. But Reddit had the same issue at times, where multiple subreddits for the same topic existed, although generally it merged down into a single subreddit that was actually useful.