You misunderstood the pinned post; it’s soliciting donations for core Lemmy development, not for the .world instance.

The core devs use donations to the project to fund their tankie .ml instance, which is why they’re getting pushback. There is zero comparable pushback among the community towards funding .world or other instances.

If you’d like to give away any free toasters with hackable embedded microcontrollers to prove your point here, I’m a willing recipient and will attempt setup of a searx instance.