this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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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.
This works if you have an audience already though. Small instances won't have that already but they'll be expected to federate and hold like 40 servers worth of data/content just to start up and not seem dead. Then try to grow their user base, and without ads as the norm beg them to donate as they scale up. Or just do it at a loss for a long time which really reduces the pool of people willing to run a Lemmy instance that isn't a shithead.
There's already another reply saying if an instance runs ads just leave it. And this exact stance is why so many Mastodon servers have shut down. In some cases apparently when servers started showing ads to their users, other servers defederated them as a show of force against it. And then they withered and died.
As onboarding costs get higher and the amount of new users signing up dwindles instance growth is going to stagnate then probably go negative. Unless everyone can be chill about stuff like ads like I said we'll end up with just 4-5 big servers who let's be honest are just early adopters not necessarily the best places. Or Facebook who can spend money like no other, shove their users in, and will just control the whole thing.
I don't want ads but we've seen how mastodon failed and users retaliating against them was a big issue.
Don't forget you can always self host one's own instance and access the larger fediverse from it, without Ads. So because it's open source, itll always be easy to access the fediverse with an Ad free experience. A personal instance doesn't need to grow, scale, host 40gb of data, or have any content at all either so it doesn't come with the issues of a public instance.
This just doesn't make sense at all. IF Fb ever added ActivityPub support (it would take a huge rework of their format) but instances would just defederate from it like they did with ad supported instances. And then what is even the point of FB ActivityPub support if their exiled.
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.
That seems like a pretty good argument for us all to join the patreon.