this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2025
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Yes, ads would be unavoidable, but there would be the possibility of distributing the revenue more fairly. Otherwise, the only option would be to accept donations to accounts, but no one would likely use that. I'll say it again: ads are not an option in the Fediverse, not even in a transparent way, and not even though ads not only finance the internet, but have also traditionally been a major source of funding for things like quality journalism (subscriptions have never been the main source of income here). Nevertheless, it remains a fact that good content costs time and skill, and therefore usually money. Without monetization methods, there will always be a shortage of content that is more than just reposts from elsewhere. So it seems to me to be an unsolvable problem. But of course, I also completely understand why the Fediverse fundamentally rejects monetization—at least in the form of ads.
Even if ads were a thing, they would be instance specific, unless they just took the form of posts advertising things (much like Reddit has) which personally I find to be toxic as hell. How would that money make it to content creators?
Personally, I'd prefer to read posts from people who want to post them because they have something interesting to share or something they want to discuss, rather than people who are trying to maximize engagement because engagement = income. There's plenty of other places to go if you want to be fed that kind of content.
I think the sweet spot was 20-25 years ago when we had special interest forums with tight-knit communities around specific topics. It would be nice to get more engagement on Lemmy in niche communities, but I'd argue the way to achieve that is to go to other places where that content is posted, and share links to content on Lemmy, as a way to spread the word. Part of the problem there though is recognition, and if people see links to 20 different lemmy instances, they won't associate those with lemmy as a whole, they'll see it as all disparate things, and I'm not really sure how to solve that.