Here me out
The only way Lemmy can remain this way, and be able to afford the rising cost of server upkeep is to rely on ad revenue generated by bots, generated on dead websites. Now ofcourse the people running the servers would need to also own these ad riddled websites.
The way it would work, is droves of AI get trained to surf the internet, click on click bait, look at ads, and simply simulate human foot traffic.
This money would then go towards server upkeep in the fediverse.
It's kind of a loophole.