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.
Fun fact, you can link an external image and have it show up in your comment as the actual image like this
![image alt text](https://image url)
The format is the same as adding a url, the key is to put the exclamation point at the beginning of the format.
Honestly I’d be fine with most instance owners putting in a “show ads to support running costs” option in our profile settings. I’d turn it on to support them because seeing an ad here and there doesn’t bother me.
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.
Dude no stop
I kick down a couple bucks a month to my Mastodon server operator via Patreon, and figured I’d do a similar contribution here at some point. Not everyone is into donating but hopefully enough users would be willing to help keep their instance healthy if asked. I’m pretty new here but I easily found the donation options for my Lemmy instance.