I’m fairly new and don’t 100% understand it yet, but instances are run on servers that require money. Are we heading towards seeing ads or subscriptions to raise funds instead of relying on donations to cover overhead?
Especially with the influx of new users. Hardware upgrades are needed.
I am more of a business person than a developer, so I approach it from that perspective.
I suspect that we will see different instances using different ways of paying for the service. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least bit if there might be an ad supported instance, donation supported instance, subscription instance, etc. I think this is great because it puts power in the hands of the user to choose the experience they want. It should strongly encourage the design of a platform that prioritizes the user.
Right now things feel hacked together, but its inevitable that at some point performance issues, onboarding friction, and UX issues will be addressed. I really think its only a matter of time before decentralized platforms talking to each other take over.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see a pay-to-federate model as well.
I’m hopeful that no single instance will gain such a large proportion of the userbase that they could try to defederate and hold other instances to ransom like that. I’d like to think their users would jump ship rather than be cut off from the rest of Lemmy.
I think though that more needs to be done when onboarding new users to spread the load across more than a few popular instances.
I could maybe see users supporting it if the instance in question were open about their finances and were using the money for purposes the users involved approved of.
For example if the money were being used to pay infrastructure costs and for one or more Lemmy developers rather than to make server owners rich.
Personally, I will always block ads and never use a service that I can’t ad-block, but I will sometimes pay for services that put the money back into the product. So I might support a patron model.
100% and I actually love this about the fediverse. Everyone can experience it within their own rules.