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!
In my view, the problem isn't monetizing an instance, but that ads right now are fundamentally problematic. I don't know of a way to introduce ads that wouldn't be intrusive, invade user privacy, introduce bad motives for admins, and just be generally unpleasant. If money is a problem, I think a subscriber model would be better suited for the platform rather than taking any step to normalize ads.