even the worst corporations are on the right side of something from time

Well, corporations (best and worst) are always on their own side... which sometimes happens to be the same as their customers' :)

With something so niche as pico-8, you are probably better off just biting the bullet... In your shoes I'd investigate if there are viable FOSS alternatives and, failing that, just fork the 15USD the developer of PICO-8 asks for.

I have four accounts on the four instances that host communities I am interested in.

It's a mild pain and definitely not what we were promised, but I guess that's the only way federation can really work in practice (especially considering when an instance is blocked user on the blocker side just continue to see it frozen in time, with no warning as to what's going on)

Why do you care how it turns out financially for reddit? The outcome I'd wish for is that more people come to lemmy

Those are CPU from, like, 2014... they are definitely "beefy" (ie. needlessly powerful regardless of what you plan to do with them) but not more powerful than modern mid-range CPUs (which have way lower TDP).

This is not to mean that the server is necessarily a bad deal (how much is it?)... there's lot of stuff on top of the CPU, but you should definitely factor in the electricity cost (especially if you are not the one paying for it and/or are sensitive to climate issues) and see if you can maybe buy a more "humble" server with a modern CPU and fewer, bigger drives (each hdd consumes more or less the same amount of power, regardless of capacity).

Oh, make sure to check if those old CPUs have hardware-accelearted video codecs if you plan to do transcoding!

Also, make sure to compare prices from ebay.