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.

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[–] JoeKrogan@lemmy.world 38 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

I'm gone if there is ads even though I'd block them. I'm sick of ads. They have ruined the internet .

If they add a gold like feature that splits between the instance and the project that would be useful in addition to community donations.

I'm here because its not like the rest of the internet. I run tor relays to help the network, I contribute to foss projects and I seed distros too for the greater good. There is enough of us here to keep it going.

[–] killick@kbin.social 9 points 1 year ago

I've been chipping in for my mastodon server for over a year. The admin there posts the finances so we all know when it's time to kick in again, but if we went to a paid rather than donated set-up, then I'd be OK with that. If my admin decided that he needed to run ads that were like printed newspaper ads then I wouldn't mind so much. But ads that track me, ads that change size, ads that show up and block some or all of the screen, ads that play video and audio, pretend to be content etc are the ads I dislike and I would flee.

[–] Kettlepants@lemm.ee 4 points 1 year ago

Couldn't agree more.

There should be somewhere a constitution in the federation within which advertisements are banned. Completely.

[–] halo5@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

undefined> If they add a gold like feature that splits between the instance and the project that would be useful in addition to community donations.

This seems like the best solution, IMO.