I’m fairly new and don’t 100% understand it yet, but instances are run on servers that require money. Are we heading towards seeing ads or subscriptions to raise funds instead of relying on donations to cover overhead?
Especially with the influx of new users. Hardware upgrades are needed.
That’s up to the instance owners, really. I don’t think the Lemmy software currently has ad support or anything like that but we could see that in the future.
Currently, most instances operate on the generosity of others. For instance, the one I’m on is mostly paid for by its owner/operator with some help with donations.
At some level they start taking so much resources that they’ll need a way to be sustainable anyway. Personally, I’m hoping we see a horizontal spread out, where small groups and individuals start running their own instances. Seems more sustainable than only having like 3 large ones everybody uses.
Yup, and this is a good thing IMO. Ad supported instances, subscription based instances, and donation based ones all can coexist, and users can pick whichever they prefer.
Much better than the alternative of “you get stuck with whatever the current CEO thinks is the best strategy”.