The whole idea to check the donations came from stumbling upon this post which discussed costs per user.

Things should be put into perspective. The cost per user is actually the fixed monthly cost of operating an instance divided by the average number of active users.

In the discussion you linked to, there’s a post on how Lemmy.ml costs $80/month + domain name to serve ~2.4k users. If we went through opex/users metric, needlessly expensive setups with low participation would be a justification to ask for more donations.

Regardless, this is a good reminder that anyone can self-host their own Lemmy instance. Some Lemmy self-host posts go as far as to claim a Lemmy instance can be run on a $5/month virtual private server from the likes of scaleway.

Is there something else I’m not seeing?

Possibly payment processing fees. Some banks/payment institutions charge you for a payment.

Walter Bright has fairly odious political opinions;

I fail to see the relevance of what personal opinions and beliefs he may or may not have. You’re making it sound like the goal is not to improve a language ir fix issues, but to take something away from a person just because you disagree with their political opinions. That’s hardly good use of anyone’s time, and sounds terribly petty behavior.

I wish I had that much free time to be able to waste it being so vindictive about such trifling issues.

Which languages have you invested/migrated to, only to find that “political stunts” had a “negative impact” on your planned development?

I don’t waste my time with meaningless irrelevant stuff. Either a tech stack serves it’s purpose, or it doesn’t. I don’t have enough free time to waste it trying to cancel others.

From the blog post, it sounds like the underlying motivation is not tied to technical aspects but control over the language. If I had invested any of my personal time onboarding onto D and migrated any of my projects to D, I would be concerned about the negative impact these political stunts have on the tech stack.