I was talking about charging subscription fees for the instance login, not ads. I imagine if you wanted to fork lemmy and change it to inflict ads on your instance users you could do that, too.

I’m not thinking it’s an awesome business proposition right now, but if the fediverse gets big enough that users are willing to pay for Enterprise Reliability™ then I could see it happening.

It used to be that you could self-host your email server or use your cool friend’s server. But these days almost everybody uses commercial hosting. I see lemmy and mastodon going the same way if they grow enough.