Alternatively, you can simply stop accepting new members (or shut down completely) if the donations dry up and you can’t afford to run your instance - or if you just don’t want to do it anymore. Other instances will take up the slack. Lemmy will live on. That’s how the fediverse works.

I can’t speak for others, but I don’t consider posts I made on a website I don’t own to be my property. If anything, it’s amusing to think of my idiotic rants making up a tiny fraction of an AIs “knowledge”.