Lemmy.World Announcements

29037 readers

3 users here now

This Community is intended for posts about the Lemmy.world server by the admins.

Follow us for server news 🐘

Outages 🔥

https://status.lemmy.world

For support with issues at Lemmy.world, go to the Lemmy.world Support community.

Support e-mail

Any support requests are best sent to [email protected] e-mail.

Report contact

DM https://lemmy.world/u/lwreport
Email [email protected] (PGP Supported)

Donations 💗

If you would like to make a donation to support the cost of running this platform, please do so at the following donation URLs.

If you can, please use / switch to Ko-Fi, it has the lowest fees for us

Join the team

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

Why do instances not run ads? (self.lemmyworld)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by arisoda to c/lemmyworld

125 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] kadu 90 points 1 year ago (9 children)

Nothing stops them from doing so.

But I don't think that's the path you'll see super often. Most people enthusiast enough to host their own instance and open it to others probably disagree with ads, and users are very likely going to reject them.

Plus, wether we like it or not, Lemmy is majoritarily used by people with a lot of tech knowledge - the exact same group you'd expect to be running ad blocking software.

But if federated social networks keep growing to the point they could rival a platform like Reddit, for sure some ad supported instances will coexist with user-funded ones.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Plus, wether we like it or not, Lemmy is majoritarily used by people with a lot of tech knowledge - the exact same group you’d expect to be running ad blocking software.

Same was true of reddit when I started there...

Hell, Facebook used to just be a tool to find people in your class for sharing notes at first.

Social media starts out niche and then once the community is built, others join.

load more comments (8 replies)