Something that makes forums a bit different is that it costs the owners when people use the website.
Unlike Blender, Firefox, Linux, etc… A server host can’t just make the forum available, then set and forget it, they either have to pay a huge fee to some host like AWS, or have a huge stockpile of computers in their basement.
Perhaps you are right. They also have server costs, but maybe they aren’t as big. But other federated networks exist: Mastodon, Matrix and PeerTube. I don’t think they have ads, so Lemmy should be able to at least reach their size without them. I can’t say what would happen when it reaches a billion users though.
On the other hand the costs will be distributed among many instance owners, so I don’t know why ads would be needed. We can have thousands of instances for example.
Something that makes forums a bit different is that it costs the owners when people use the website. Unlike Blender, Firefox, Linux, etc… A server host can’t just make the forum available, then set and forget it, they either have to pay a huge fee to some host like AWS, or have a huge stockpile of computers in their basement.
How do you think Blender, Firefox, Linux, etc, are distributed? Probably get more requests per day than any single Lemmy instance does.
Perhaps you are right. They also have server costs, but maybe they aren’t as big. But other federated networks exist: Mastodon, Matrix and PeerTube. I don’t think they have ads, so Lemmy should be able to at least reach their size without them. I can’t say what would happen when it reaches a billion users though.
On the other hand the costs will be distributed among many instance owners, so I don’t know why ads would be needed. We can have thousands of instances for example.
Yeah, I think by default Lemmy shouldn’t have ads, but if instance owners want to add them to pay for server costs it makes sense.
Though if they can survive off of donations, I agree that it’s way better that way.