TLDR - Why don’t Lemmy instances use methods like affiliate links to increase their funding?

I’m a relatively new Lemmy user (I created my account today.) and I noticed that some Lemmy instances are slower than others and that video and GIFs aren’t supported. To fix this, Lemmy instances would require more funding. I know that Lemmings don’t want instances placing ads in their feeds, but couldn’t they find other ways to receive extra funding? For example, the Pi-hole project has affiliate links on their site and they earn a bit of money every time you buy something through a link. Why can’t Lemmy instances do the same? Edit: I don’t mean ads and I hope they don’t follow us here. I mean on the funding page for an instance, they’d have affiliate links to things like Amazon so that they could get more funding. Not as a post either, like Pi-hole’s method.

  • ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝A
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    1 year ago

    I have suggested this on my home instance. It’s nice to claw some money back from folks we link to and it should scale better than just donations.

    I do think it might require a bit to update any links with an affiliate code to properly work but it seems doable.

    At the moment, most instances can get by on donations from a core, enthusiastic set of users but, as numbers grow, I suspect the percentage donating will drop. Necessitating other the exploration of other avenues of funding.

    • Spaceman Spiff@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Currently, the biggest challenge will be storage. Any images or videos uploaded directly to Lemmy (as opposed to linking a 3rd-party site) takes up space on every instance that federates that post. For large instances, this can get overwhelming.

      Aside from that, the server specs to host Lemmy, even a large/popular instance, are remarkably low. It can easily be covered by just a handful of users, and not even particularly generous users.