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.
In part you can see this already - there are a bunch of
serversthat most lemmy instances have defederated from. In these cases information flow is one way - f.e. lemmmy.world doesn’t get any updates fromfoo.baz, doesn’t provide search results, communities, etc.Subscription would make sense when the added value you provide is 1) availability guarantees, 2) performance guarantees, 3) membership guarantees, 4) moderation / content filtering options