Its not a secret that no ads on lemmy, which makes the process more difficult paying for hosting to keep your instance only, so tell me!
How do you fund your lemmy instance? do you sell products through lemmy? Donations? how you convince people to donate to your instance? Do you sell subscriptions? how?
The biggest cost really isn’t hosting, because lemmy can easily be run on a VPS for less than $10/month. The biggest cost is moderator time, and they should be paid for if they’re running a good instance.
Right now at least, you can put donation links in your site sidebar, or possibly do funding drives via posts.