That’s why you should always go open source and update regularly.
Reddit website is one of the slowest among big corporations, hdare they judge others.
Your concerns are valid but the whole point of fediverse is so that anyone can host their own instances, as with the users are encouraged to sign up different instances instead of a central one so will the cost never be as astronomical as something like Youtube or Reddit and there will not be a catastrophic loss even if a major instance does go down. While I agree admins should be allowed to have donations accepted, I don’t think admins should treat this as a business at the first place.
TL;DR: For a not so huge volume instance, the cost isn’t as high as people would think, I believe the community can sustain itself.
Lemmy and Kbin are just open-source software that can be run on servers. To answer your question, in short, the community has the most influence over the fediverse.
Linux is your best shot, Chrome really isn’t that memory consuming nowadays.
It looks very decent, something I would buy.