I built Zyke: Discussion Forum, a discussion forum & social news aggregator like Reddit. Loads fast, moderation is transparent, has user mentions (@), hashtags (#), a democratic voting system and a modern rich text editor.

But how do I monetize without running ads? That’s why I’m skeptical about adding Zyke to the fediverse. The community dislikes products with ads, so it feels like a bad idea to me. I don’t even intend to put pop up ads, just clean banner adverts

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[–] wiki_me@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 week ago

I am highly skeptical this will lead to anything. i will use closed source if it's better for me and saves me time but this does not seem like a good product (why not just use lemmy/piefed?).

Just having federation could bring more users to your site, which could lead to more ad revenue. of course some in the open source space really don't like ads. phoronix allows to pay you to go ad free and seem to be doing ok for the last 20 years. it's founder seems to be working full time on the site for the last 13 years. And honestly people also just use ad blockers (myself included). If you don't block ad blocker that could also help.

It could go a long way if you will invest some of that revenue back into the fediverse and open source. valve isn't really a open source company and steam is not open source but it seems to be liked due to investing in FOSS.