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.
Why do we want a single instance to be as large as reddit?
narrator: We don’t.
The members here now are least likely to want a centralized instance.
The July 1st influx will be similar.
Future waves from other FU’s will get progressively less techie and more likely to see federated communities as meaning that “this is STILL not ready as a drop-in replacement??”.
That said, I joined reddit so long ago that people looked at me cross-eyed when I tried to explain sub-reddits. You would think that something analogous to sections of a newspaper wouldn’t be THAT difficult to grasp, yet here we are with people freaking out that now it’s basically just saying we have different sections of different newspapers.
“Yes, Virginia, there is a Technology section at 2 different newspapers. You might even come to appreciate being able to get 2 different slants on the same topics.”
“No, you don’t have to live in a city to subscribe to their newspaper. It’s really not much tougher than mailing someone in another city and you do that already.”
The truth is that most people, even those who have been burned repeatedly by centralization, won’t appreciate that it’s worth modest effort to avoid it until there is at least one very large Lemmy instance that gets its Zuck / Elon / Spez.
A lot of this issue can be fixed with technology advancements, and improvements in Lemmy itself. I think a lot of people ‘forget’ how things have improved over the years. Twitter improving the character limit, Reddit improving search…
Lemmy may not be there yet, but neither were the others.
I see no reason why ads can’t be ‘opt in’ at a client or app level (IE, the ap or other website shows apps, pays the server the user chooses). Same with ‘paid’ apps giving a share to their favourite insurance etc. The issue needs to be one of ease of payment - as with most business models.