Even if you barely donate, you’re donating more than most users. Everyone should help in whatever capacity they can and there isn’t any shame in not being able to contribute as much as others. I’d love to see how many donations some of the FOSS purists here make haha. I bet a lot of the real toxic FOSS bros don’t contribute anything.

Idk if that’s even a hot take. It’s something I’ve talked to several people about and honestly one of the reasons I don’t think lemmy will end up growing much past its current user base. Too much micromanaging when most people just want to see content that interests them.

Every time someone was displayed an ad it made the world just a tiny bit worse

By what metric?

Lemmy has gotten quite a bit of money in grants. It’s safe to say that without the grants allowing the lemmy devs to work on it full time, it wouldn’t be as functional as it is now. Getting grants really isn’t easy and that shouldn’t be the barrier to whether or not you can be compensated for your work.