Hexbear.net poster who wanted in on the action
lemmy.world is run by the same people as mastodon.world and it is already donation funded. They post financial updates on their blog: https://blog.mastodon.world/
they have been funded by grants from NLnet (I think from EU funds?) but I think are transitioning to donation-based.
No matter how politely stated your disagreement is, if it boils down to “I don’t think I should have to respect trans people’s identity”/“I don’t think trans people should have rights” then it’s transphobic and I’m 1000% fine with that being bannable
the lemmy source code is public
hexbear is currently running an old version of lemmy that doesn’t support the v3 API or federation. migration to a more modern lemmy is in progress
Cloudflare does have the ability to spy on traffic though, they hold SSL keys.
they are now on a modern variant of lemmy, but still pretty customized. There is a small compatibility issue with mobile apps being worked on but otherwise yes. I believe they are workign on porting their changes to v0.18.1 of lemmy now.