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The idea is to remove profit motive, and distribute the actual costs to the users or admins.
Same way as any enthusiast could have run their own BBS back in the day. The perk now is they're linked together.
I would be shocked if it stays like that forever everywhere, but since the early days there's generally been some way to eat the cost.
The internet and even the web didn't need profit for many long years before the web went commercial. I've been publishing my own website since 1996 without advertising or asking for donations. I just publish it because I love the topic. Profit is NOT the be-all and end-all of existence.
Don't believe me? How much would you sell your children for?
it is more sustainable to pay for your small chunk of a network than to pay for a monolith that encompasses everything
I think you might really be asking about sustainability, not profitability (profit is what you have after all the bills are paid). It's generally donation-based. I'm sure different communities will have different ways of soliciting donations.
EDIT: I'm no longer partial to the below. I much more like PrimalAnimist's suggestions.
~~For larger, expensive instances, I'm partial to determining the cost of running a single user over some period of time (say, 5 years), and posting that little datum on the community info. Then, each user that donates that amount gets a badge reward. Users that pay double the minimum get a different badge, and so on. Cycle the badges every n years. Some users will have fancier badges, displaying a kindness for the poor and badgeless. Cultivate a culture of gratitude for those who support, and you won't have to worry so much about not having enough.~~