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!
Despite how necessary it is to pay for hosting, ads have ruined nearly all browsing experiences save one site where the ads were maintained by the site themselves and could be purchased by the users to advertise threads.
I doubt any of the instances have a mod team large enough to want to maintain dedicated “For Sale” comms and make sure nothing dubious is going on.