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I donated 100€ to my instance 2 years ago and probably wont donate again for a while, unless there is a huge drop in donations to my instance.

• I believe that people who have to actively think about their money usage on a daily or monthly basis should not feel any pressure to donate anything to anyone.
• Any site/service/dev that makes their donations public and transparent is significantly more likely to get any money from me.
• If you only offer PayPal or other 3rd party payment services then you also wont be getting any money from me.

Milan who runs tchncs.de which hosts a fuckload of different great FOSS services like lemmy, peertube, pixelfed, matrix, gitlab, and many more has a great breakdown of his donations and costs over time with plots and everything. https://tchncs.de/en/donate

He is getting enough to cover expenses, but not enough to pay for upgrades or for his work hours. The donation amount required per user (if everyone donated) to cover everything is around 0.30€/month. This is calculated with a rough (probably under) estimated user count and a sysadmin hourly rate of 60€. To cover just the hosting expenses its less than 0.10€/month

These numbers should get even better when scaling up to more users and even at this scale the full coverage would be just 3.60€/year/user. If you are just hosting one service that you can optimize the shit out of, all this should become much cheaper too.

But yeah realistically only something like 1-2% of users will donate anything that means the people that do donate have to give much more to make up for the ones that dont. This is fine tho because not everyone has money to give.

the whole platform would be completely different

This is not a good goal to have anyways lol