I am the administrator of:
I administrate a PeerTube instance (peertube.wtf) and everything is just much more complicated compared to a Lemmy instance.
One reason I don’t “auto-federate” is because there’s a ton of pirated and questionable content. So much content is in a foreign language and so many instances are inactive and therefore filled with spam.
That’s why I add instances manually to federate with. This way, the quality of the content is also much higher.
It’s a one time payment, to help fund the development.