Hey, thanks for asking. I run all of the backend - including paying for the costs associated. Lemdro.id has a pretty unique architecture that has taken a lot of work to perfect. As a result, we can scale down and up extremely easily as ijeff mentioned.

I will be setting up an OpenCollective eventually to accept donations, but I wanted to get the architecture stable and lemdro.id fast before I allowed people to contribute towards it. Just for your information, current hosting costs are looking to be around ~$35/mo which I am quite alright with funding on my own until I get that setup. Financially backing lemdro.id, once launched, will allow me to take advantage of the scaling architecture I've built to deploy servers to different regions outside of the US to keep response times low globally, too.

The idea was to make a big "state of the lemdro.id" post soon-ish that details costs, architecture, and importantly transparency. Our admin and moderation teams are fully transparent to the public via our Matrix setup, and the server architecture is slowly being integrated with GitHub. The idea is to allow the community to make contributions to improving the architecture of the instance they use by submitting PRs which then get deployed to a staging environment once reviewed and eventually pulled into production as well.

TL;DR: Yes, we will accept donations via OpenCollective which will allow us to expand lemdro.id globally to offer lower access times in other continents. This will become available once some personal goals I have set to increase lemdro.id transparency and open-source-ness are met.

If you'd like, I can ping you once I've got it setup, but you can expect to see a post in the !lemdroid@lemdro.id in the next couple of weeks regarding this anyways!