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.

  • @Katana314
    8•1 year ago

    I’d probably be fine with Old-Style Internet Ads: A Div that displays a bit of text or a small image that suggests an interesting product for the user, possibly related to the page content they’re viewing.

    But new style internet ads demand things like iframes, numerous scripts, user tracking, user anti-tracking circumvention, and attempts to weasel their way out of the small sidebar they’ve been scripted into. If there was any way for an advertising network to ban/blacklist any advertisers that do things like that, or even offer them a limited model for what they can add to a page, I’d be a little more okay with them.