For $500 you can get a decent refurbished server on ebay that supports those “new” extensions

This is a bit of vicious circle. How much of that money goes even into keeping those servers running? The electricity bill alone, geez. They could do a dedicated fundraiser to get themselves two boxes that are a decade old and still have spare parts available, coming from Broadwell era, they will have enough instruction set support to cover the baseline towards which multiple distros are converging (Haswell and up).

I am 100% sure that if they put out a call for action and asked for hardware donations they would be able to get newer stuff. Ryzen 7 1700 goes for as cheap as 50$, DDR4 ram at supported speeds (2133 MHz) is also dirt cheap.

$1500 / month is probably swallowed by how much of powerpigs those Opertons are, like they are bad, real bad.

>$1500/month

Wow, i just got into newpipe/fdroid. Its neat to think even a donation the size of mine can be almost individually meaningful :)