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.

  • pancakes@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    20·
    1 year ago

    One big difference right now is that it’s a ton of small people donating their time and servers for this. So the costs aren’t as centralized and are spread over many people.

    I saw a thread of instance owners talking about why they host, and some actually get free server usage through their work or run servers already and Lemmy only uses a small portion of that.