Lemmy

Nah ... The piece missing here is that people pay them to manage a "self-hosting" situation. Basically, if you want to run an instance either for yourself as a single-user instance, or a small community, or maybe even a larger one, you pay them and they take care of a lot of the sysadmin stuff, including the cost of whatever cloud provider they're using. Masto.host provide something similar for mastodon, and is fairly popular. These people are taking that idea and extending to a relatively comprehensive suite of platforms.

All of which, IMO, makes a lot of sense ... specifically, taking the sys admin requirements out of hosting an instance democratises the community building that can be done by running an instance. More generally, creating more specialised roles and services in the fediverse, IMO, should improve its health and diversity.

Beyond all of that ... I think this is a good idea they have. Basically, if a platform is in demand, an automatic donations system is built into their hosting service so that support goes back to the platform.