It's also reasonable to donate to your instance admin (although in your case for lemmy.ml, that's the same people).

The funny thing is with youtube, for example, I am a premium user. I deactivated all tracking of my habits on there. Now I am greeted, as a homepage, with nothing else than a call to action to reactivate said tracking. As a paying customer I see less (as in none at all) content on the homepage than an anonymous user would. I am subbed to 170+ channels. Yet they tell me they cannot come up with suggestions unless they can track my every step on their platform. sus. And when saying funny I mean extremely aggravating.