I've been hosting a gaming server plus other related stuff myself for some years now.
While the user base will definitely be different, relying solely on donations is unfortunately not sustainable long-term. Donations fluctuate massively based on time of year in my experience. So it's always good to periodically remind your community that lemm.ee needs donations to survive long-term.
When I do those reminders, users come out of the woods in droves to donate. It's less that they're unwilling to donate and more that they just forget to donate.
I was frequent poster/commenter on Reddit before having a mini burnout by so many of my comment chains just randomly escalating into pointless arguments by toxic people, so I turned into a long-term lurker after that.
Conversations on Lemmy are definitely way, way more inviting to partial lurkers like me who want to join in conversations once in a while without having to think about some random toxic people basically hijacking the conversation I'm having to satisfy their need to vent their toxicity onto the internet.
Currently, the default sort type for comments is "Hot".
I checked the settings, and there doesn't seem to be an option to set the default sort type to anything else such as "Top" which I massively prefer.
It's not the biggest deal since I can always just click on "Top" once the comments load. But it would be nice if there was a way to change the default type....