Phase 1: Collect underpants

Lemmy isn't profitable, and doesn't plan to be. It's not designed to be a moneymaking enterprise, it's designed to be an decentralized community running on P2P open source software. If you work in the web development or IT industry full time, you likely have the skills to set up an Instance of your own for little or no cost, even of its just a side hobby on your personal computer.

Yes, in a way this means we are the equivalent one of those massive 'miniature' train sets that adult hobbiests play with in their garage.

I know you probably have seen a lot of answers from others already and my answer would probably be the same as others (for obvious reasons) but I am going to answer anyway because you told me not to lurk. Please note that I am not an expert (or even somebody who knows much about business) so don't expect my answers to even be half correct.

If by profitable you mean "not making a loss" then probably yes as long as if there are enough donations to cover the expense of running the server.

But if by profitable you mean "making enough money to be sustainable long term" then my answer would be most likely not because it's not designed to make money (unlike ahem...certain platform)

In addition to all of the answers here, development costs for protocols like ActivityPub can be partially offset by grants by organizations like W3C that work to build open standards.

They aren't, and due to the type of culture that is common here many users are outright hostile to any monetization other than charity. mastodon has had instances being defederated for the crime of attempting to introduce advertising or subscription.

It remains to be seen if this changes, but for now you're unlikely to start a fediverse instance for profit.

I believe Lemmy makes money like Wikipedia does for now

I run my own instance just because I want to build a community that people can enjoy. I do it out of my own pocket and don't ask for donations of any kind. Not everything is about profit for some people. If I were running a site as big as Lemmy.world, then I would consider it, but only to cover some expenses.

This has come up multiple times in recent weeks, naturally, but it's interesting that it's always framed as being about profitability. As if simply being affordable or sustainable isn't enough.

Communities being a source of free value for the server admin is always baked into the discussion.

Centralized, corporate social media has done... bad things for how we see and interact with the world.

I don't know the answer.

They aren't

The idea is to remove profit motive, and distribute the actual costs to the users or admins.

Same way as any enthusiast could have run their own BBS back in the day. The perk now is they're linked together.

I would be shocked if it stays like that forever everywhere, but since the early days there's generally been some way to eat the cost.