As an instance admin having to post ads is literally my worst nightmare. Honestly, I might just throw in the towel if that ever becomes necessary.

Do not ever open that Pandora's box willingly. The cash advertisers give you is a honeypot, it's something that ensnares you and sends you down a rabbit hole of "targeting" on which a whole industry of surveillance has been built in the past decades, one which you would slowly and inevitably be forced to join. On the scale of the entire internet, we need to grow up, learn to say no.

If large instances get to a point where their staff cannot afford to host them, we can maybe chip in if needed. It's already happening a lot on Lemmy and it's great to see that -- but honestly, it's just also not that expensive to run the platform. I hope that doesn't change in the future.

In the long run, it's less expensive to chip in than to watch ads. Those ads only work if they do actually have an effect on your spending (and I worked with marketing experts, you can trust them to meticulously track every single dime your site brings in for them), so you're still making people spend money, but now you make them spend money on someone else's product because that someone else will give you a small share, as opposed to having them spend that money directly with you. And that spending not only has to pay for the service you provide, it also has to pay for an entire industry fine-tuning the best methods to waste people's time and deteriorate their attention spans to send them down a rabbit hole for what they should buy -- in the end, you're literally making the user experience worse and having your users pay for it.

There is only one business advantage in ads: they are a form of forced revenue. When you ask someone to buy something or donate, you're asking for their consent. When you shove an ad in their face you're ignoring that, and they need to resort to adblockers to gain back the control you've taken from them. Which is also one of the many reasons I don't ever want to see ads on the fediverse.