Humanity risks losing its identity in pursuit of profits.

Yes, it will and zuck will feel fulfilled and stop thinking about more money.

May be not.

Would people pay ? Wiki barely gets by, we have so many models that are ad based but very few subscription based(am I wrong ?)

Lemmy.store to support lemmy.world, the community can design and sell custom community themed merch.

The 100$ was an example but I get your point. It feels like every option leads more or less to some billion dollar company becoming richer.

I hate ads like the rest of us but can community donations sustain the instance ? If they do why dont we have that model yet ? Why we still keeping using YouTube and Gmail etc ? What percentage of community would donate ? Will be donating to the community or the server instance ? Will there be push back from users of small communities who are paying if the money goes purely into the maintenance of large communities ?