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.

Why is background crypto mining not used? If it’s openly communicated and is an opt-in option, people might prefer that over donation or ads.

Honey, no... I appreciate where your head is at with this one, but the goal is to make browsing an instance a good experience, and as computationally simple as possible. Adding mining to the front end of an instance client is very poor for the long term sustainability of the app, because it will incur electricity costs for the end users that will have diminished returns for the instance. So it is a very inefficient way to fund large instances. Users would save money by giving instances money directly rather than letting them mine on their clients.

Ads work because the advertiser believes that their is market value in showing a user an ad, and they can be right or wrong, but financially they are willing to pay more than the electricity cost of showing the ad. I don't even mind the idea of ad supported instances in principle, although I would probably block them to preserve my browsing experience.