Your post made me think ads had already invaded. So, I hate you.
That’s not going to happen on Lemmy. It is technically possible but it’s very highly unlikely.
It’s an unfortunate reality but that’s probably going to have to happen. Instances can’t be expected to grow and maintain on pure goodwill. Some might get by with donations but it’s pretty known that Mastodon servers that couldn’t support themselves on donations vanished. It’s a huge ask for someone to pay money, time and effort to run a server for perpetuity. Usually you can only ask for 2 out of the 3 lol.
We already saw the original lemmynsfw get overwhelmed and just want to shut it down and hand it to someone else because they were having to put in so much work.
Hopefully because Lemmy is opt in in every sense, instance owners can do an ad setup that isn’t intrusive or over bearing.
Otherwise it’s just the big instances that are donation covered that stay and grow and Lemmy just becomes centralized around 5 servers or something.
archive of our own does a fundraising event, and asks for donations until they get to their target. I could see Lemmy instances following the same model; if they do it right and get themselves listed as a non-profit, they can even get fundraising functionality into an app, and set it up so that Apple doesn’t take their 30% cut.
I also think, we’ll have ads at some point - and that’s perfectly fine and understandable as long as these ads aren’t too many and aren’t too intrusive. My hope is that because of lemmy’s federated nature a healthy competition will emerge. So whenever an instance starts overloading the users with ads, users will just move to another instance with less adds at the blink of an eye.
How to fund the instance is up to the instance owner. The one I’m on has a Patreon. Not sure how the bigger ones are managing.
Why did you pick that instance, out of curiosity?
E: Posted the same comment three times, looks like. Still getting used to this.
I doubt that will happen, but when I am reading Lemmy threads I usually develop quite a thirst. To combat that, I drink Brawndo the thirst mutilator. It’s got electrolytes!
