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.

      • LostCause@kbin.social
        1·
        1 year ago

        Some corporations already market to pedos too, they certainly market to nazis on twitter. They just do it in a covert way until someone from the media notices and points it out and then pretend it‘s all a big accident. Or they don‘t give a fuck cause their reputation is trash anyway, like say for example scam organisations like shitcoins and this whole “alternative medicine” bullshit. I can‘t even blame them for it, stupid people like neo-nazis are an easy demographic to market to, just have some white guy say it‘s good and they‘ll buy it.

        Either way, I‘d rather be here with some of that which I also dislike than on some corporate website again. Especially with defederation, as long as I choose a good instance I hopefully won‘t encounter it too much.