I’m really enjoying lemmy. I think we’ve got some growing pains in UI/UX and we’re missing some key features (like community migration and actual redundancy). But how are we going to collectively pay for this? I saw an (unverified) post that Reddit received 400M dollars from ads last year. Lemmy isn’t going to be free. Can someone with actual server experience chime in with some back of the napkin math on how expensive it would be if everyone migrated from Reddit?
not forbidden, just difficult to make work. you’d have to create a fork of Lemmy with support for ads, and you’d have to convince people to come to your instance when there are so many ad-free instances out there
As we’ve already seen, there remains a pretty strong impulse for users to centralize on a single instance (as evidenced by lemmy.ml and mastodon.social). Ads can be wielded as a way to drive users to less burdened instances while also serving to help mitigate operating costs – it’s actually a rather elegant solution when you think about it from a problem-solving perspective rather than a profit-making one!
It makes sense, a lot of ad-based products just use the ads to annoy the user into paying a removal fee. The services that don’t have that really try to integrate the ads into the service like Meta and Google.
People who hate ads.
So good luck.