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.

  • simple@lemmy.mywire.xyz
    1·
    2 years ago

    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.

    The point of Lemmy is NOT to have a single instance compete with Reddit! That would just be Reddit V2 then. There just needs to be more instances to distribute the user load more evenly. Running a small/medium sized VPS costs about as much as a Netflix subscription.

    • arisoda@lemmy.worldOP
      01·
      2 years ago

      Sure, but couldn’t you still have a 30 million user community in a single instance? Or would you also like that community to be spread out over multiple instances? Probably not because that would splinter communities. But having such a big community in a single instance, is still hard to host. Expensive. And donations may not suffice.