What constitutes Usage Data. Is it sharing the posts I view, communities I subscribe to etc?
Does paying for a premium version stop this data being collected?
I believe its possible, at least coming from the minecraft world. if the instance doesnt grow as big as lemmy.world or something then you can ask for patrons and other ways to get donations. a lot of the plugins I use for my minecraft servers are run this way and its the way i run my server, I just ask for a dollar donation if possible from my players and that covers a little bit more than what the server costs me to run. when I check some of the plugin’s patreon page they pull in about 1k-8k a month
https://www.patreon.com/coreprotect
The reddit gold model didn’t work. Reddit was a VC funded start up though, so if was expected to make a lot more than just enough to keep the servers going.
I’d bet lemmy instances can get by on donations and reddit style awards. Like you say, it can be incentivized further with cosmetic rewards.
Let’s not follow reddit through the enshittification manifesto. There has to be another solution, and we won’t find any if we allow ourselves to settle on the first half baked idea an already failing website had at some point.
