Non-targeted ads can also be an option.

You buy a fixed space on a certain page for a period of time and pay the owner. The way it worked in the early days of the internet.

Probably a lot more subscription based stuff. People don't flinch about spending $50-$100 on their phone subscription but email, which is equally important, people expect it to be free from places like Google.

I don't want to be that person and bring up this argument which isn't answering your question but does big tech need to be funded? There is great open source alternatives to most big tech which are either ran by volunteers or funded by donation. They would be so much better supported if big tech alternatives did not exist.

Big tech selling hardware would still be funded that way. Apple, Lenovo, etc etc would be similarly funded. Microsoft sells licenses to their operating system.

I would argue the world would be a much better place if big tech wasn't funded and open source projects were king.

Donations - regular is also fine, it doesn't have to be one time

No one should be locked out of software becauee they can't pay

Something that I saw royal road was they only accepted Ads from other authors. Which led to some fanstatic MS Paint ads trying to get people to look at their books.

We could do silly stuff from the fediverse to "fund" each service. The more human made the better. Could be fun to get a MS Paint looking lemmy/piefed ad.

Id put a 20 in a shitty paint piefed ad. That can only be shown if you click the "I want ads please" in the settings lol.

Microdonations, I don't feel one person consumes that much server resources (I FEEL I don't know, the rest of the message lives off of this assumption) So like if you have 100.000 users paying 0,50 cents a month you have 50,000usd to pay for server costs, maybe it is expensive but I have a feeling it doesn't cost 50k a month to support 100k users (talking more about lemmy or some social media like app not a live service for something like a videogame)

I actually ran into this European initiative earlier which aims to help fund public European social media, maybe something like this could help?

From the little research I did it seems this isn’t necessarily for the Fediverse, but the funding could be used for it from my understanding. I’m curious what others think of this.

End capitalism.

Many big tech initiatives in the fediverse are funded via nlnet grants. I think they have one open specifically for pairs made up of an artist and technologist to promote content creation currently, but they open fairly regularly.

A self sustaining endowment, courtesy of a few headless billionaires

I think it would be nice to have a payment platform where I set aside a fixed amount per month, and I can divide it among as arbitrarily many creators, maintainers, and admins as I want, and I can easily add payees as I find people I want to support, however little I have to pitch in. I would even be happy to give a small slice of the monthly to the maintainers of the payment platform.

I know just enough about payment processors to know that this would be a significant pain to implement and run, and would be a continuous target for scams and other malfeasance. I have thought a fair amount about how to implement something like this and I still don't know how I'd do it. But I think it would be nice if it existed.

Nonprofits with public earnings and expenditure records sustained by government funds and donations maybe? Idk

Donations, or if that doesn't end up working in the long run (even though it is definitely working as far as I can tell because we have numerous instances and platforms already), I guess you could switch to a subscription model, but I think that'd put a lot of people off.

This answers so obvious: All of us are already giving a full 1% of our income directly to Wikipedia and VLC. ...right guys?!

I pay for the services I use.

Fundraising drives. Pair time and money provided to the ability to shape policy, in part to allow for vested members to have a say in the community.

unpopular in some circles, one could sell user generated content

Maybe opting in for the types of targeted ads you are okay with being exposed to but not personally targeted ads?

So maybe I’m okay with opting in for ads about video games or movies in my primary language, but I personally would not opt-in for ads for gambling sites. Also, I’m okay with advertiser knowing their ad went to someone that opted in to see that genre of ads, but not tying that ad data to specific individuals because that’s weird.

I've been thinking about this for a bit and best I have is a vague idea about using a model similar to cable tv but instead of a fixed amount of "channels" aka websites, the sites themselves can choose to be vetted and added to a list of sites under an umbrella org. The purpose of the umbrella org would be to vet and license or similar the websites to ensure they're not predatory, meet certain advertising strictures, ensure against enshittification, etc. You pay a subscription fee to the umbrella org and in turn they help ensure a better internet.

Not a great idea or very fleshed out but some kind nd of circle of trust would be awesome. Keep sites focused on what they want to be. Advertise relevant to the content. Site get funded via the umbrella subscriptions.

I really like KDE’s “donate to get yourself added to a program’s credits” idea.