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.
I am, somehow, on both sides. I do think monetization is necessary, but would also like to keep part of it out of it.
I guess that I see monetization a bit idealistically, like having non tracking ads and sponsorships, or having separate instances with paid accounts that is also financing others… stuff like that. But that might not be enough anyway, as it is not for reddit, twitter, fb, yt… even with all of their data harvesting and selling.
So maybe donations are the way to go? Wikipedia is one of the biggest sites of the world and is managing to collect enough money through donations.
Lemmy/Mastadon is even easier, country/cities can have their instances to allow their citizens access to social network, companies can have their instances for their users and potential users or just as giving something to community.
And we can have this kind where we donate to individual administrators.
I think that even if I would enable adds they would get less than 1USD per month for me, let’s say I donate 10USD per year for lemmy+mastadon?
Maybe tutanota, protonmail can have their instances? They are already hosting stuff, so would be a big problem (except moderation).
I can see all of this fail, but I also see it can succeed.