Why do instances not run ads?
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.
Sure, but couldn't you still have a 30 million user community in a single instance? Or would you also like that community to be spread out over multiple instances? Probably not because that would splinter communities. But having such a big community in a single instance, is still hard to host. Expensive. And donations may not suffice.
This isn't reddit. Stop trying to make it a centralized place.
What you call splintering communities is a feature of federation and helps everyone out.
Yeah forgive me for not understanding, but I thought the decentralisation is the distribution of different communites, not of the same communities. Or perhaps you are in fact talking about different communities, but then you have to make that clear.
But even so. There may be many instances, adding to the total cost, which would still increase, and so the number of people needing to pay. This may not scale. I'm very doubtful.
There was still decentralization of same communities on Reddit. There are multiple subs for gaming, anime memes, tech news, etc.