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.

  • Givesomefucks
    1·
    1 year ago

    Plus, wether we like it or not, Lemmy is majoritarily used by people with a lot of tech knowledge - the exact same group you’d expect to be running ad blocking software.

    Same was true of reddit when I started there…

    Hell, Facebook used to just be a tool to find people in your class for sharing notes at first.

    Social media starts out niche and then once the community is built, others join.