I’m hoping for an instance with a fully transparent management and overhead structure: show us what it costs to run, divide that by monthly users who want to have a say in the future of the server, charge a membership fee that reflects those costs and a little cushion for the future. Having a token fee per account also discourages bots.

It depends on the number and type of ads… but honestly, the threshold at which the ad revenue would actually fund the instance would probably be too painful for me to bear.

I should be honest though and state that I fully believe that the advertising industry is a cancer in our society. Despite what it has taught us about our own psychology, I think we as a people would be better off if it didn’t exist.

Not opposed to ads necessarily, altho would be opposed to any trackers that are used for ad-targetting.

Not sure this is even possible with Lemmy tho?

I’d stay unless the ads were too bad.

However, I don’t know how those ads would show up in Lemmy at its current state.

I’m already considering self hosting my own instance, so I’m probably not your target demographic, but I would leave pretty quickly from an advertising instance. If an instance wanted alternative funding they could offer plans with value add of some other type if they wanted to subsidize server costs