First up.. this is not a call for donations.
Without going into the personal details as to why: I don't have the energy to give this place the attention it needs, and I'm no longer willing to cover the majority of running costs.
I don't have a fully fledged solution to this, and don't have the energy to come up with one. The best I can come up with is I hand the reins over to Nath, and some sort of community funding is set up to cover costs.
If anyone knows of above board methods to establish a crowd funded piggy bank for something like this, I'm all ears.
With the traffic we get, probably really wouldn't make a dent. I think we could very comfortably afford no ads, provided calls for donations go out more regularly so we don't forget.
Seems to work just fine for Wikipedia, one of the most used sites on the internet.
I don't agree with your gut feeling on this. Even a much much larger instance like .world doesn't have ads.
The whole idea of Lemmy is to be unenshittified Reddit. The second we puts ads on here, what even is the point?
Donations is very sustainable for non-profit driven websites that aren't too bandwidth or storage heavy, in my view. We just need to prompt users a little more, and create ways to easily have automatic regular transactions.
Obviously all those examples are preferable to ads. So I'm not sure what you're trying to say. They are asking for donations, yes, but they are surviving without having paid promotion of external products, and that's the point.