Neat, good to know!

I don't think you can link communities like that ? Or maybe it's only supported in some clients / instances. My understanding is that you need to link them by using the usual markdown link syntax (or the link button below the editor) and input /c/anarchychess@sopuli.xyz as the link target.

Like this:

[anarchychess](/c/anarchychess@sopuli.xyz)

Which will render like this:

anarchychess

Note however that I've had some problems with this previously. I suspect that the first time someone tries to access a remote community from whatever instance you're on, your instance runs some heavy API queries which are prone to failure if either instance is under heavy load.

Basically, volunteer code commits, volunteer admins, and donations for hosting costs.

Fosstodon is a pretty great example. It's a fairly large mastodon instance which makes enough in donation revenue to pass some on to other open source projects. It's not heaps ($600 in 2021), but I think it demonstrates that donations are a viable funding model. If things got tight I expect the community would meet the challenge.

It's not like you need to build a custom data centre - it's just renting a server, maybe even a VPS.

That said, of course the admins and mods are volunteers. I'd like to imagine that one day a few lemmy instances could charge a subscription fee for a premium, well managed experience.