I know you don’t like begware, but that’s another model that can also work (most of the instances have celebrated their first birthday recently)

"Begware" seems so negative - I like to recall the maxim: "If you are not paying for the product, then you are the product." The rise the Big Tech social media firms was propelled by convenience and there being no obvious upfront costs. Enshittification has shown us what the actual costs are.

The Fediverse shows a better way to do it but, if you aren't selling your users data, then someone has to pay. If one person is footing the bill, then that is a single point of failure. Luckily, costs are quite low, so it doesn't need a lot of people to chip in to cover the costs - I will.admit to being concerned when we launched the feddit.uk fundraiser, as I wasn't sure how much we'd raise but, within a couple of days we'd got almost enough to cover the year's costs with a good steady stream of donations. It means the instance's financial future is secure.

You have higher costs as you manage 10+ instances.

The costs of running the instances is sunk already, because I run them on the same infra that I use for my projects, and it's not a couple of hundred dollars per month that is going to make or break things for me. The worst case scenario is "I go back to a full-time job and Communick becomes yet-again a side-project/hobby". The case where any of these instances become big enough to the point that it demands more from me is better than any of the current situation.

(begware is) another model that can also work (most of the instances have celebrated their first birthday recently).

I honestly don't see it this way. Activity through the network has been abysmal. Operating an instance at this level should be incredibly easy, but even then we have things like bigger instances having issues with lack of moderators, basic federation issues between the larger instances mostly because of network latency... all that show that we should be collectively putting a lot more resources into this if we truly want to have a credible alternative to Reddit and Facebook Groups.

If anything happened to the most popular 10 instances, Lemmy would probably die overnight.

I don't want to sound too pessimistic, but Lemmy feels pretty much dead already. My feed is mostly content from the communities that I've been posting + the two of three stubborn users (like yo)u who have been trying as hard as possible to make something out of it.