static

You do not, awards do not propogate to other servers.

I’m anti awards and status. donations on feel good works good enough to cover the expenses.

And even then there could be donated vs award servers.
I prefer to focus on the donated ones.

It was a bit mean/dishonest from me to frame costs for you.
my guess of dounations just does not match yours.

So when scaling up

You expect that : costs per user rise and donations per user drop?

I expect that: costs per user drop, donations per user stay the same, and external subsidies rise.

Not at this stage.
Lemmy grew too fast, got many more eyes.
Step 1 is getting a security focus group selected from the people who contribute code to lemmy.

Just like the admins and coders volonteer their time, security specialists will too, money might be needed, but that is not in the the first steps.

I would like to see some numbers first. Donations work fine for mastodon.

Edit : here are mastodon.world financials https://blog.mastodon.world/

The issue for lemmy is the same as mastodon

The Mastodon.social privacy policy covers a lot of this, https://mastodon.social/privacy-policy

This is the least every lemmy site should have