The problem with Voat was it was attempting to be a single platform that hosted everyone. That meant a single group of people were footing the bill for every user on the platform.

Lemmy instances can be hosted for as little as $5/month plus the annual cost of your domain name. This decentralized nature means it's much easier for a single user or even group of users to sustainably fund their instance. And since everything is federated by default, all of those small instances are making contributions to the larger platform that is the threadiverse and larger fediverse.

Our inscance's admins pay for the project out of their pocket and will be delaying accepting donations for as long as possible. Other instance adming accept donations though. There are also instances that accept donations and if they get too much money then they send the rest to the lemmy devs. I think that it's the https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/ that does it but i'm not 100% sure.