lemmy.world is run by the same people as mastodon.world and it is already donation funded. They post financial updates on their blog: https://blog.mastodon.world/

they have been funded by grants from NLnet (I think from EU funds?) but I think are transitioning to donation-based.

Just to get it out of the way: there are obviously some issues with lemmy discoverability and quantity of content

But to be blunt: this is not the kind of user lemmy needs right now, he won’t be missed. He doesn’t want to join a community, he wants to scroll a feed that is pre-curated for him. And to be honest, that is most redditors, for better or for worse, but the core of the site, what gives it most of its value besides just scale, is powerusers and mods who will see: “oh there isn’t a formula1 comm yet? I’ll make one”. Boom. Problem solved. among a userbase of thousands there will be other people who want to talk about F1, but you need at least one person to be engaged enough to create the community and post to it once in a while.

This perspective is fundamentally self-defeating if you want to get an alternative off the ground. It will take off if people get into it, and it won’t if they don’t

No matter how politely stated your disagreement is, if it boils down to “I don’t think I should have to respect trans people’s identity”/“I don’t think trans people should have rights” then it’s transphobic and I’m 1000% fine with that being bannable

the lemmy source code is public

hexbear is currently running an old version of lemmy that doesn’t support the v3 API or federation. migration to a more modern lemmy is in progress

Cloudflare does have the ability to spy on traffic though, they hold SSL keys.