It probably goes against the philosophy or whatever of FOSS or Lemmy itself, but why not be a little evil so that you can actually sustain yourself? Donations can bring us far, but small non-intrusive ads can be a bliss in the skies for the people actually hosting the instance. Especially if there are millions of users uploading thousands of images and videos. This is extremely expensive.
Is running ads really that taboo?
EDIT: some people seem not to get the point of “millions of users”, which presumably includes non-techies that do not use adblockers. I mean that without ads (or mining?), no instance would be able to scale to the point where it can compete with Reddit for example. If you were to want that.
Most Mastodon, Friendica, Calckey instances accept donations.
It is likely that kbin/Lemmy instances will likely follow the same model.
Advertising would not work on the Fediverse as the adverts would be blocked by other instances so the spread would be very limited so not attractive commercially.
That is one of the beauties of the federated model.
Also, as there is no algorithm or data about user interests there’s no scope for advert targeting which advertisers would want.
The whole ethos of the #Fediverse is anti commercial.