Seems to work just fine for Wikipedia, one of the most used sites on the internet.

I don’t agree with your gut feeling on this. Even a much much larger instance like .world doesn’t have ads.

The whole idea of Lemmy is to be unenshittified Reddit. The second we puts ads on here, what even is the point?

Donations is very sustainable for non-profit driven websites that aren’t too bandwidth or storage heavy, in my view. We just need to prompt users a little more, and create ways to easily have automatic regular transactions.