which are already doing all the work and should definitely be compensated somehow.

That’s why I donate monthly to my instance :)

A pretty decent sized instance managed will uses a few boxes and some CDN, runs a couple to a few hundred a month, it doesn’t take that many people paying to cover it.

It’s not as bad managing the smaller instances. The app works like it says on the tin until you get really big.

IMO lemmy.world let themselves get WAY bigger than they should have. They had to start doing a hell of a lot more work to keep the thing up.