It probably goes against the philosophy or whatever of FOSS or Lemmy itself, but why not be a little evil so that you can actually sustain yourself? Donations can bring us far, but small non-intrusive ads can be a bliss in the skies for the people actually hosting the instance. Especially if there are millions of users uploading thousands of images and videos. This is extremely expensive.
Is running ads really that taboo?
EDIT: some people seem not to get the point of “millions of users”, which presumably includes non-techies that do not use adblockers. I mean that without ads (or mining?), no instance would be able to scale to the point where it can compete with Reddit for example. If you were to want that. And not for profit, but solely for sustainability.
Nothing stops them from doing so.
But I don’t think that’s the path you’ll see super often. Most people enthusiast enough to host their own instance and open it to others probably disagree with ads, and users are very likely going to reject them.
Plus, wether we like it or not, Lemmy is majoritarily used by people with a lot of tech knowledge - the exact same group you’d expect to be running ad blocking software.
But if federated social networks keep growing to the point they could rival a platform like Reddit, for sure some ad supported instances will coexist with user-funded ones.
Same was true of reddit when I started there…
Hell, Facebook used to just be a tool to find people in your class for sharing notes at first.
Social media starts out niche and then once the community is built, others join.
I’d like the idea of certain instances becoming so large that it attracts the larger populous and becomes one of the major platforms. That is if it remains to be open source and federated.
(Edit: or just a community)
Why is background crypto mining not used? If it’s openly communicated and is an opt-in option, people might prefer that over donation or ads.
I would much rather traditional ads than crypto mining. I don’t want Kbin or Lemmy to become environmentally unfriendly electricity sinks.
I’m probably just being idealist of whatever but personally I really hope it doesn’t. I don’t really like the idea of one instance getting so big that it has the ability to disrupt all the other ones, I’d much prefer in was all just little niche servers run by people who are passionate about the subject, even if it’s not making them any money.
But probably it’ll all just eventually conglomerate into one big thing and then turn rotten and we’ll all have to find something else, because that always seems to be the way it goes. But these are the wild west days for this platform, enjoy it while it lasts!
But that’s the beauty of ActivityPub. You can always just fork the code yourself and start a new project that could federate with Kbin and Lemmy.
Ad paragraph 2: The beauty is that you do not have to only enjoy it while it lasts. FLOSS cannot end in this way. As already explained by @[email protected], if this all just conglomerates to a centralized and rotten state, you simply create another instance and federate exclusively with those instances that are not rotten. Maybe only with the smaller instances that, for example, focus on a topic you find interesting.
You do not even have to fork and maintain anything. You simply use the SW as is, but without having to deal with the aspects that you find problematic (centralization on a few large instances and rotten admins, etc.).
I consider stuff like that malware.
Why not just skip the step and instead ask people to join a mining pool instead of what some people to be malicious utilization of their machines.
Crypto mining has a lot of negative conotations, and for good reason. The whole crypto ecosystem is full of scammers and bad actors. And ad supported websites only have incentive to monetize more and more until they are ad infested and can only be used with an ad blocker. That’s the state of a lot of the web today. Plus most big ad networks come with user tracking baked in which is another downside.
I’d rather have a nominal subscription model just to cover costs rather than see an ad anywhere. The cost of hosting per user can’t be much more than a dollar or two per month. Web hosting isn’t all that expensive nowadays.
Honey, no… I appreciate where your head is at with this one, but the goal is to make browsing an instance a good experience, and as computationally simple as possible. Adding mining to the front end of an instance client is very poor for the long term sustainability of the app, because it will incur electricity costs for the end users that will have diminished returns for the instance. So it is a very inefficient way to fund large instances. Users would save money by giving instances money directly rather than letting them mine on their clients.
Ads work because the advertiser believes that their is market value in showing a user an ad, and they can be right or wrong, but financially they are willing to pay more than the electricity cost of showing the ad. I don’t even mind the idea of ad supported instances in principle, although I would probably block them to preserve my browsing experience.