My understanding is in the case of lemm.ee they were getting enough donations to cover the technical operating costs, but they did not have enough high-quality volunteers for admins (and presumably not enough money to pay admins. It would require a lot of money to pay fairly for that work).

[–] Kevnyon@lemmy.world 3 points 17 hours ago

I agree and I think the cost of paying admins would far exceed that of server costs. Nobody would do it unless they could support themselves with it and that's a lot of money that you'd have to scrape together to be able to pay multiple admins.

[–] tfowinder@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

This made me curious, how much funding does it actually require for maintining reasonable amount of users in the long term ?

[–] Kevnyon@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago

Since I am not that familiar with AWS and its pricing, I am not sure. Two years ago on this instance, an admin commented on this thread that it cost 180€ per month to run the server. So that's at least 2160€ per year and that's not including the labor and there's only so much volunteer work that anyone is willing to put in, as is evident with the shutdown of lemm.ee, which cited a lack of volunteers as one of the issues that lead to the shut down.