Asklemmy

Really, the only direct cost of lemmy is the development. That's the beauty of lemmy's decentralized nature, the cost of actually running it is spread out among tech hobbyists with spare hardware and time (edit: and only ~$30/year or less for a domain name), or may even have some money to throw at new hardware. For most people, the connectivity doesn't incur any additional cost to whatever they're already paying for internet access.

There are plenty of free and excellent open source projects that neither charge money or generate profits, they're driven by passionate developers who give their and talent for the enjoyment of it and betterment of the community.___

Really nice merch, with small logos on. Think how the LTT stealth stuff is.

Are ads forbidden?

IMO it sounds like that some AI corporation should host their own instance(s). They only pay for server and maintenance costs, while community does the rest and they have their data.

Would be best of both worlds, isn't it? Once they become greedy, we are f*cked again, just like Reddit did...

I think the idea is that many people can run lemmy servers so the load is split between everyone hosting them.

Personally I plan on donating the price of Reddit Premium to my instance owner

By not asking the same question every single day.

Bank accounts and escrow and payment processors are complicated and require real companies with tax identifiers. Nobody is gonna set that up just to host an instance. IMO this is a perfect use case for crypto. Could be a monthly thing or micropayments. Maybe something a bit like the Basic Attention Token.