I am not fine with that. This should be community driven and not ad driven.

I like the idea of community fundraising drives more. Digital advertising sucks and is a scummy industry. They all exist to collect your data, track you, and sell data to the highest bidder.

No. Please no.

Internet ads exist to track users, and all those tracking pixels can also cause performance issues. Ads basically don’t even make that much money per impression and for the most part just frustrate people. It’s a lose/lose for everyone.

I'm donating specifically to stop this from ever happening.

Absolutely not!

The attention based, advertisement business model is the "original sin" of the internet. If you're not paying for the product, you are the product. You are what's being sold. It changes all the incentives for the site. It's why social media and news media have become so toxic and polarizing.

It's why Reddit has made every one of it's unpopular decisions. It made them, to create a better product for it's customers (advertisers), not because it makes a better experience for us. If we want the best site for us, we need to be the customer. That means we need to be the ones who pay for it.

This is absolutely, undeniably a bad idea.

I think it's a much better idea to normalize donations to Lemmy instances.

It's highly problematic to bring advertisers into the fray. As others have mentioned, with ads comes tracking and targeting. Data used for unintended or unknown purposes. It seems antithetical to the community most are trying to build here.

Oh god no. Let us know how much you need so we can as communities figure out together but let ads be the last resource. I know the ads always win but man would it be nice if that wasn't always the case. I never saw the reddit ads and am spoiled (reason #1 why i am here now) i have hope and i will try to always give money and time to the one social media network i actually use and enjoy.

No ads EVER. I'm still learning Lemmy, I wish I could set up my own instance but have no idea where to begin.

Dude just throw them a cent (and I mean quite literally, a penny). People really overestimate how little profitable ads are in the year of our Lord 2023, specially for how much a PITA they are.

The Apollo dev gave recently some GREATLY optimistic estimates of how much Reddit earns per user, around 12 cents per month. Yeah no, I prefer donating twelve cents thank you very much.

its possible as long as its not a drive for profit, the primary issue with these kinds of tools is that making the profitable kills them in a big way.

ill be running an Ad-free instance.

Please no. I'd rather contribute actual dollars (and I do!) to ensure the success of my preferred instances.

I’d rather spend a couple bucks donating than see ads. If I was on an instance that decided to add ads I’d change instances and if ads were in the communities themselves I’d find a similar ad free community.

Truly an unpopular opinion lol. Like others have said, I would gladly setup a recurring donation to sustain my instance. From what I've read, most instances are relatively low cost as long as their user count remains small.

Another thing I'd be willing to do is pay a small monthly fee to host an instance on a server somewhere. I'd restrict the user count to ensure the cost to host remains low.

I'd prefer both of those options over ads. It's unnecessary considering the entire idea of the fediverse is to spread out users across many small instances instead of having some huge costly monolithic instance.

If the ads are relevant to the community they're seen in it wouldn't bug me. As much.

Basically like a sponsored post on a community once a week would be fine I think. As long as the community it appears in is ok with it.

I really don't want advertising.

We have things like Patreon and crypto. It's much easier to organise some community funding there. This is the better way to do this.

I’m not cool with that at all. I am, however, cool with the idea of an affordable “Lemmy Gold” that can be awarded to posts for increased visibility, and that money could go towards sustaining the server. Private torrent sites cover their costs and then some easily with donations. There’s no reason that Lemmy couldn’t do the same as long as they don’t get obsessed with data collection and ad targeting.

God no. I've seen enough ads in my life. I've taken a lot of steps in my life to avoid them as much as I can. Just let us have somewhere safe for once.

I agree. There could be donation or invite-only (including self-host) instances too, that's the beauty of federation.

I don't know if it would work here. You would need a really entrenched userbase that wouldn't just up and leave to an ad-free instance. And how would you serve ads? Sponsored posts would have to be non-federated or else you'll end up defederated. The fact that you can interact with posts from a different instance makes banner ads seem useless.