I’m fairly new and don’t 100% understand it yet, but instances are run on servers that require money. Are we heading towards seeing ads or subscriptions to raise funds instead of relying on donations to cover overhead?
Especially with the influx of new users. Hardware upgrades are needed.
Honestly, we really don’t know. mastondon.world and lemmy.world are run by donations and that’s worked so far. Ruud and his folks have been pretty upfront about their finances.
The general temperament I’ve gotten is people around here are opposed to a corporate like monetization. I agree with that. Usually, at least what I’ve observed, is that when a service monetizes it becomes enshitified.
As someone who also doesn’t fully understand stuff yet, best comparison I’ve seen is email.
I’m sure there are emails that cost money, but for the most part you can just. Move to a different email. If a group is on a server that’s asking for money they can just change to another server, right?
In the old days of forums, it wasn’t uncommon for a forum to ask for some small donations. which was never a problem (a good forum had a lot of good will and people willing to contribute). Remove the profit incentive and websites are not eyewateringly expensive to maintain.
Does anyone know much Lemmy.world costs to run? I imagine as Lemmy gets more popular the owners may be more inclined to provide paid subscriptions or post some advertising to defray the cost.
Most servers already seem to have Patreons or similar donation platforms running, and subscriptions would not surprise me as everyone starts to settle into this thing. It would make a lot of sense to help spread the load and since content wouldn’t be gated behind the subscription, I can’t see why it would be bad.
I think I have similar thoughts on ads. If an instance wants to run ads to support itself, I don’t see an issue as long as those ads aren’t “federated” out and sent to other places.
I think the ability to have all of these different setups, without restricting any access to content, is the beauty of the fediverse. At least as I understand it.
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