Super unpopular opinion but, I do think there will have to be some middle ground. All of us in Lemmy can see the issues with something beautiful and free thing like this. It exists only thanks to highly skilled people putting in ridiculous hours and the donations of a few folks but shuts down, has trouble scaling up etc.

If we want Lemmy to get big enough that the niche communities thrive, we’ll probably need to figure out a way to pay the devs, probably moderators and if we want truly engaging content, the posters.

I don’t know what that looks like but the flip side of the “there are only low effort memes and few good in depth discussions” is that we gwt what we pay for. If we don’t want ads, some form of direct albeit minimal payment seems like an eventual solution.