I've enjoyed it, and this has been one of my most visited websites during that time. But I'm still not sure I'll stick around after lemm.ee shuts down at the end of this month.
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).
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.
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.
Well kind of yes and kind of no. I never closed my R account, and I still check there maybe once a week. So in that since "yes". But on the other hand, the quality of posts and discussion is pretty low. It feels like a lot of the content there is posted to meet some goal, such as selling a product or influencing opinions - rather than just sharing thoughts and ideas. I find that pretty off-putting. Despite the very high comment counts, genuine discussion there is almost non-existent. But the one bit of value I do sometimes get is it often has some piece of niche news that I'm mildly interested in.
The Threadiverse is terrible when it comes to news, and niche content. Though as you say Reddit is terrible to actually try to converse with someone on, or even to read through the comments section is like listening to eight year olds (of whatever physical age).
I too go back to Reddit when needed lately, though in read-only mode.