It feels like this is how social media and the Internet should have been all along. Truly run for the interest and good of humanity, and out of the hands of corporate control and profiteering. People, out of their own generosity and goodwill, host their own instances and let others use it for free. It's such an awesome example of humans helping each other and working to create abundance for everyone to enjoy.
I believe that everyone putting their time, money, and effort into building up the Fediverse - the developers, server owners, mods, and everyone else who keeps it alive and interesting - is helping to make the Internet (and by extension, the world) a better place. You all are awesome. Keep up the amazing work.
Also hi, I'm new here. I found out about Lemmy today, and I was so intrigued that I spent all day learning about it lol.
At some point, when instances get big enough, the large costs may require running ads for upkeep. But ideally it should stop at "just covering the costs" and not needing to do the capitalism thing to keep making more and more money every quarter
Or, with the community we were able to gather, maybe we should adopt a patronage system or a bitcoin system like the one used in "Odysee". It would feel much more honest then, because I feel that in my opinion the adds system corrupts beautiful communities like these, and the best proof to what I'm saying is the "Reddit" situation. (It starts with adds to keep the site running... then blows up into full-on capitalism)