Mostly to test about how activitypub works, also paying out of pocket for $5 a month.

I have a pretty unique domain name and don’t mind the $7 a month to run the instance on AWS. I’m not going to do a ton with it, but I would if there was interest.

I chose to host my own instance for my community because I wanted to be independent from any other instances' administration, federation decisions or any sorts of politics.

Right now I'm paying for it out of my own pocket, but I'm working towards setting up a donation flow.

Run it on some free or cheap cloud instance https://paul.totterman.name/posts/free-clouds/

Well the bigger ones do take donations, and its working out fine.. you can see the same thing working on other fediverse platforms

Since a lot of you are here, are there any good communities for Lemmy admin discussion?

Because I don't want to be reliant on someone else's servers, plus I can set it up exactly how I want.

As for how I pay for the server, I use a free OCI VPS, so... I don't.

I already owned my own home server that I built for running a file server and other random things. Currently all I’m paying for is $2.50/month for a proxy server on Google Cloud so I don’t have to expose my stuff directly to the internet.

I host my own instance mostly because I find it fun to do, and because it allows me to choose which communities and instance I federate with without having my account tied to the whims of somebody else.

I don't host a lemmy instance yet, but I host other services and I do it mainly for fun. As far as I have read, a small scale lemmy instance runs very well on very low performance hardware, which means the cost of running it is probably less than 10 $ a month.

The big lemmy instances that need better hardware have patreons and other services where people can donate money.

I host my own, and I already have servers for other reasons so there's effectively no extra cost because I can easily handle the load.