I’m fairly new and don’t 100% understand it yet, but instances are run on servers that require money. Are we heading towards seeing ads or subscriptions to raise funds instead of relying on donations to cover overhead?
Especially with the influx of new users. Hardware upgrades are needed.
I could maybe see users supporting it if the instance in question were open about their finances and were using the money for purposes the users involved approved of.
For example if the money were being used to pay infrastructure costs and for one or more Lemmy developers rather than to make server owners rich.
Personally, I will always block ads and never use a service that I can’t ad-block, but I will sometimes pay for services that put the money back into the product. So I might support a patron model.