this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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Why do instances not run ads? (self.lemmyworld)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by arisoda to c/lemmyworld
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It probably goes against the philosophy or whatever of FOSS or Lemmy itself, but why not be a little evil so that you can actually sustain yourself? Donations can bring us far, but small non-intrusive ads can be a bliss in the skies for the people actually hosting the instance. Especially if there are millions of users uploading thousands of images and videos. This is extremely expensive.

Is running ads really that taboo?

EDIT: some people seem not to get the point of "millions of users", which presumably includes non-techies that do not use adblockers. I mean that without ads (or mining?), no instance would be able to scale to the point where it can compete with Reddit for example. If you were to want that. And not for profit, but solely for sustainability.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think what would be useful would be a transparent system where the instance owners would keep a record of how many users / interaction they're getting and how much it's currently costing.

That way if they say they're supporting 20,000 users and we need a VPS instance that costs X a month for the current number of requests, you can somewhat forecast the need for expansion

I get the idea isn't to make mega servers like Reddit, but if people like the UI / experience of a single instance it's hard to tell them to go elsewhere. Having transparency about actual costs would be useful, you could have a little widget on the sidebar or footer showing how much it currently being donated.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I think the instances themselves don't feel much different (for example the UI for lemmy.world and lemmy.studio is like exactly the same), but I feel like maybe there needs to be some quality of life tools to help a new instance succeed with more ease.

  • Like it's hard to know that the instance exists, so it'd be nice if the UI makes signing up for one as easy as possible,
  • One big con at the moment too is it's actually kind of hard for me to find communities in a small instance. The large instances somehow people already added like all of them, so I can search for pretty much all of them. I think to encourage joining new instances, ideally should give the creator an easy way to like just add every single community across different aggregators. Maybe even a bot that just automatically does this so it doesn't have to be updated, or at least give the creator of that instance that option if they so choose
  • Give easy way to migrate account. For example today I just learned about a website with a list of the kbin servers, and thought maybe I should move from kbin.social to put less strain on it. However, I made my kbin.social account with my gmail, and I prefer to be lazy and just log in through gmail. I can't make a new account on say kbin.chat with that same gmail account actually, so I'd have to use another email account, and I didn't want to do that. Also in my 2 days on kbin, I made a community, and if I just abandon my kbin.social account, I don't know who would be the "mod" of that community now. There's already some data I'd like to not have to start over on