I’ll start:
- Some significant portion of funds go towards development of the Lemmy software. 80%? Rest goes to lemmy instance hosting.
- Ads are reasonable and non-intrusive (no popups etc)
- People can still browse w/ an adblocker
I personally would gladly turn off my adblocker if I knew the ads were supporting development. Hell, I might even click a few!
None
Yea. The question is completely absurd. There is no such thing as “reasonable ads”. It is also completely against the philosophy of the project and the developers would never agree to it.
You may as well just browse Reddit at that point.
Also, ads are very much “give an inch, take a mile” in nature. Once you open that door and have say a tiny banner ad, then it’s like “well that didn’t do much harm, let’s do a slightly bigger one”, then before you know it it you have sponsored posts, sidebar ads, videos and all that nonsense.
It’s just one of the avenues where enshittification creeps in IMO.
I see two misconceptions here.
First off, there is such a thing as reasonable ads, namely, ones you want to see. Sometimes you are looking to purchase something or some service, and you have to go out of your way to look for options. Ads for what you want, when you want is ideal. However, the point where advertising goes to far is trying to solve this problem by learning everything about you in order to effectively read your mind. That’s where it becomes unreasonable for me.
Second, the philosophy of lemmy (and federation in general) was not to tell all instances and users of said instances how they should use the internet, it was to give them the freedom to use the internet however they want, without sacrificing the connection with others who want to use it differently. It would not be equivalent to using reddit, because an instance that serves ads would have to compete with other instances who don’t. Whereas reddit is a walled garden where you are forced to take their ads along with their content, if a lemmy instance with ads became too “unreasonable”, the users have nothing to lose by leaving, the content is all federated.
The reality is, it’s not a matter if, but when we will see instances who try to fund themselves using ads. They’re free to serve them and you’re free to defederate from them in protest. That is the lemmy philosophy.
There are no ads I want to see. If I am looking to make a purchase I will specifically seek it out. There is no advertising for anything I want that is acceptable.
Implementing ads is more against the philosophy of free and open source software than it is with Lemmy or any piece of FOSS software specifically. As for Lemmy we just won’t see any ads on Lemmy.ml in particular which is run by the Lemmy developers. It’s also not entirely true that there is nothing to lose by just cutting off the Lemmy instance that starts implementing ads if people start getting to attached to specific communities or user accounts of theirs. It would be nice if Lemmy had some kind of community and user migration to mitigate this risk.
The issue with your first point is that in order to be served ads you actually want to see, the provider (instance admin) needs to know what you like and that way leads to tracking scripts.
I’d rather just donate.
I’m happy when an instance owner just says how much it costs to run a server, how many people actually manage it and how much time they spend to keep it running. I also like it when they just come out and say “we need this much money to keep things running every month, every year, etc”
Then I just donate and there are more a dozen ways people can send and recieve donations.
I don’t mind paying for things and services if the person or people I’m donating to are just honest about what they need and why, especially if it’s a service I use often.
Same, but sometimes it’s not possible due to the different payment methods that don’t work the same accross different countries.
No, this is rewarding the implementation of ads and can’t be thought of as donating anymore. You are paying to remove ads thus giving them money for having added ads to the site.
What if the ads are optional, they’re turned off by default, but if you can’t afford to donate but still want to support you can turn them on for yourself?
There are no circumstances under which I would be okay with it. Including ads means there is a chance that content is removed to appease advertisers.
I will happily donate to my instance once they start accepting donations.
Under no conditions. Don’t try to normalize ads.
Bro, who are these people trying to normalise ads? Do y’all work for ad-companies or have you been brainwashed enough to believe ads are the only way? Ads are a braindead problem for another problem looking for a solution.
Fuck ads. Write that 50 times. If isn’t through your skull after 50, write another 50 and repeat until it is. Fuck ads.
I get that you don’t understand the ads business is propped up on halfwits like you, but you do realize that this isn’t reddit, right?
