I’ll start:
- Some significant portion of funds go towards development of the Lemmy software. 80%? Rest goes to lemmy instance hosting.
- Ads are reasonable and non-intrusive (no popups etc)
- People can still browse w/ an adblocker
I personally would gladly turn off my adblocker if I knew the ads were supporting development. Hell, I might even click a few!
No, this is rewarding the implementation of ads and can’t be thought of as donating anymore. You are paying to remove ads thus giving them money for having added ads to the site.
What if the ads are optional, they’re turned off by default, but if you can’t afford to donate but still want to support you can turn them on for yourself?
It all sounds like semantics to me. You could implement donations first and then say OK for all you people who haven’t donated we’re going to punish you by showing you ads. Bottom line is this shit isn’t free. It has to get paid for somehow.