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.
“Donations can bring us far”
Why do you believe donations won’t be enough? I dont think there is any evidence (yet) to support that.
wikipedia has survived off of just donations
although some models are going to be more expensive than others. hosting a reddit clone and a youtube clone require totally different levels of bandwidth and infrastructure
Wikipedia gets donations from famous people and large corporations.
I chip in a few bucks here and there, as well 🙂.
and me too. I’m neither of those things.