I don't see it becoming a thing. You might run into an instance here or there that does it, but it's going to be a very difficult market. Advertisers want to be confident in reaching people that will buy things.

That's the entire reason Google tracks the fuck out of everything. They can sell ads that are precisely targeted to maximize returns. That's part of why reddit wants to push everyone to their own app. Facebook does it, Amazon does it.

But for that to happen on lemmy, an instance can't just spool up the source and slap ads into it randomly. Nobody is going to buy ad space on a single lemmy instance without ad targeting. And it would need to be a pretty damn huge instance even then.

Since lemmy is a project from some strongly anti-capitalist people, they're never going to make it easy either. Anyone else wanting to add ads to their instance is going to have to fork it, or use a fork. And guess what's going to happen once they do.

Bye-bye federation. They'll get delisted left and right. Just as a matter of principle. Lemmy is overall very rejecting of corporate enshittification, especially right now. It will take years before the culture will shift enough for an ad based monetization to not get rejected soundly.

Also, yeah, servers have costs. But at the scale of a lemmy instance, most of the ones that are sharing their numbers are in the low thousands at the high end. The smaller ones are in the low hundreds. And that's yearly, not monthly. So, again, it'll be years before there's even a need for the kind of monetization that would make ad sales an option.

And when monetization is an issue? There's still going to be small instances that don't need it. So it isn't like the fediverse is going to collapse into a corporate shit spiral as long as it's on open source software, federated, and so (relatively) easy to set up.

I'm not against ads. Never have been, though im damn sure against shitty ads that get in the way of doing what I'm on the site/service to do. It's why I don't use YouTube unless it's revanced; the ads are too damn invasive. I grew up with nothing but broadcast tv until well into the eighties because cable didn't reach here. And even after that, cable had plenty of ads.

But lemmy? If there's ever any significant ad presence, it'll be a decade or more from now.