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 think if a instance owner decides to try to profit, it can happen. They could let advertisers have an account that promotes products and allow such posts to bypass community rules and disregard vote counts. You could theoretically profit from running a lemmy instance. But now your instance risks defederation and user might start leaving.
Edit: I think the smarter thing could be just asking for more donations than is needed to run the server, and pocket the excess funds. That could go on undetected as long as you falsify your operating costs to make it seem as if more funding is required. I mean I don’t know if someone could actually make a living of asking for absurd amounts of donations.
In the old days, some of the largest message board communities offered subscriptions and did have banner advertising to defray the costs of hosting. I imagine that might start happening with some of the larger instances in the future as they grow.
While this is true, some of the bigger instances are explaining in detail how much they’re paying and for what on their Open Collabarative pages. If it doesn’t add up someone will notice eventually.