I think now is a great time to remind everyone, like sync’s developer, Lemmy’s developers need to be paid too! The amount of time all the devs put into making lemmy exist, in my opinion, should be worth some of your money. If you can afford it, donating to the people who develop lemmy and/or the people keeping your home instance up will accelerate the incredible growth of lemmy!
How to prevent it from becoming a Wikipedia situation then with server owners begging for money constantly?
Accept the instance owners will be forced to turn to shittier methods of income, like ads.
Spreading the load over many small instances will likely prevent this. It can be quite cheap to host lemmy well, but everything is expensive when you scale up 1000x