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Why do instances not run ads? (lemmy.world)
submitted 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) by to c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world
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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€“] 2 points 3 years ago

As it is, that happens -- due to hardware failure or financial concerns or God knows what -- the accounts aren't available.

One possibility might be providing a pubkey method to prove that a user is legitimately a user on an instance that went down.

This is the one thing that bugs me the most with ActivityPub - identities are tied to instances. Hopefully folks are still working on nomadic identities.

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