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.
Donation based funding has historically been used amongst the fediverse and is therefore the most likely path forward. I’m also partial to this model as it prevents predatory changes towards increasing ad revenue. We see many content creators and organizations (such as the lemmy devs themselves) utilize donations as a method towards preserving the FOSS spirit of the platform whilst supporting these projects part/full time or just server and maintenance costs.
I am of the opinion that in the long term, donations will also be the best way to preserve Lemmy’s independence from profit based oversight by staying ad-free and the instances that step away from this and embrace ads most likely will be the ones that already have stepped away from the spirit of Lemmy by defederating. I have no interest in remaking reddit and many others feel the same so I am more than happy to donate and enjoy other FOSS projects.