I would much rather traditional ads than crypto mining. I don't want Kbin or Lemmy to become environmentally unfriendly electricity sinks.

I'm probably just being idealist of whatever but personally I really hope it doesn't. I don't really like the idea of one instance getting so big that it has the ability to disrupt all the other ones, I'd much prefer in was all just little niche servers run by people who are passionate about the subject, even if it's not making them any money.

But probably it'll all just eventually conglomerate into one big thing and then turn rotten and we'll all have to find something else, because that always seems to be the way it goes. But these are the wild west days for this platform, enjoy it while it lasts!

I consider stuff like that malware.

Why not just skip the step and instead ask people to join a mining pool instead of what some people to be malicious utilization of their machines.

Crypto mining has a lot of negative conotations, and for good reason. The whole crypto ecosystem is full of scammers and bad actors. And ad supported websites only have incentive to monetize more and more until they are ad infested and can only be used with an ad blocker. That's the state of a lot of the web today. Plus most big ad networks come with user tracking baked in which is another downside.

I'd rather have a nominal subscription model just to cover costs rather than see an ad anywhere. The cost of hosting per user can't be much more than a dollar or two per month. Web hosting isn't all that expensive nowadays.