TLDR - Why don’t Lemmy instances use methods like affiliate links to increase their funding?
I’m a relatively new Lemmy user (I created my account today.) and I noticed that some Lemmy instances are slower than others and that video and GIFs aren’t supported. To fix this, Lemmy instances would require more funding. I know that Lemmings don’t want instances placing ads in their feeds, but couldn’t they find other ways to receive extra funding? For example, the Pi-hole project has affiliate links on their site and they earn a bit of money every time you buy something through a link. Why can’t Lemmy instances do the same? Edit: I don’t mean ads and I hope they don’t follow us here. I mean on the funding page for an instance, they’d have affiliate links to things like Amazon so that they could get more funding. Not as a post either, like Pi-hole’s method.
I have suggested this on my home instance. It’s nice to claw some money back from folks we link to and it should scale better than just donations.
I do think it might require a bit to update any links with an affiliate code to properly work but it seems doable.
At the moment, most instances can get by on donations from a core, enthusiastic set of users but, as numbers grow, I suspect the percentage donating will drop. Necessitating other the exploration of other avenues of funding.
Currently, the biggest challenge will be storage. Any images or videos uploaded directly to Lemmy (as opposed to linking a 3rd-party site) takes up space on every instance that federates that post. For large instances, this can get overwhelming.
Aside from that, the server specs to host Lemmy, even a large/popular instance, are remarkably low. It can easily be covered by just a handful of users, and not even particularly generous users.