The whole idea to check the donations came from stumbling upon this post which discussed costs per user.

Things should be put into perspective. The cost per user is actually the fixed monthly cost of operating an instance divided by the average number of active users.

In the discussion you linked to, there’s a post on how Lemmy.ml costs $80/month + domain name to serve ~2.4k users. If we went through opex/users metric, needlessly expensive setups with low participation would be a justification to ask for more donations.

Regardless, this is a good reminder that anyone can self-host their own Lemmy instance. Some Lemmy self-host posts go as far as to claim a Lemmy instance can be run on a $5/month virtual private server from the likes of scaleway.

Is there something else I’m not seeing?

Possibly payment processing fees. Some banks/payment institutions charge you for a payment.

We are not in the middle ages any longer, we need operate like an engineering discipline.

I’m not sure you realize how “engineering disciplines” operate as crafts.

Some engineering fields might be bounded by tons of regulations and standards and specifications, but that does not remove the craftsmanship from the problem domain. At most, those surface design requirements and convert them into hard design constraints, but that does not get rid of the need to go beyond those and leave our mark in terms of subjective definitions and measures of quality.

Also, these comments on “operate like an engineering discipline” are mostly sourced from a cargo cult mentality, where mindlessly mimicking the surface-level aspects of the things they try to emulate is perceived as being key to achieve their perceived qualities. However, software is not bound by most, if any, of the requirements that other engineering fields must adhere to. It makes no sense to presume that a solution that rose from a very specific set of constraints applied to a very specific set of problems will also be adequate for an entirely different problem subjected to entirely different constraints.

Duplicate code can be a code smell, but it’s far better to have the same function definition or code block appear twice in the code than extracting a function that tightly couples two components that should not be coupled at all.

See Write Everything Twice (WET) principle.