Just a Podling plodding along.
The US courts are currently split on this. The 9th and 11th circuits hold that a business website must correspond to a physical business to enforce the ADA on them. The 1st Circuit has required fully online businesses to also have ADA accessible websites.
How many hobbiests running miniature train sets in their garage have monetized those train sets? How many backyard gardeners sell their crops.
In most cases people who choose to develop and administrate an instance of their own are largely just hobbiests of another type. Sure it costs them some money. Many hobbies cost money, it doesn’t stop people from building things or growing things for fun.
To get the full context you’d have to go back through the history of 3rd party apps on reddit which is… a long story spanning years. Part of it is about accessibility and adequate mod tools (which 3rd party apps are built to support / official reddit pretty much doesn’t)
But the point is that this was the final conflict in a long saga for a small but extremely active group of redditors including a huge number of mods. Reddit might not have lost the rest of us if they played the game it cleverly and with some tact.
I was personally pretty comfortable, apathetically doomscrolling the fromt page. But then my attention was directed towards the man behind the curtain. The writing is on the wall with the mod removals, reddit created cryptocurrency, and the sheer number of ads. It was clear I needed to remove myself from that space.
Lemmy isn’t profitable, and doesn’t plan to be. It’s not designed to be a moneymaking enterprise, it’s desigmed to be an decentralized community running on P2P open source software. If you work in the web development or IT industry full time, you likely have the skills to set up an Instance of your own for little or no cost, even of its just a side hobby on your home computer.
I’ve donated for a few months at a time back when I was dirt broke. In the short term the extra money can be a lifeline but in the long term it has more health risks associated that I’m comfortable with. There’s a lot of conflicting pressures in the actual donor center too. On the one hand they need you to donate at least twice per month to even get enough plasma that it can go to an eligible donor, and they incentivize you coming back as many times per month as is legal; I think it’s 8-10 times per month. On the other hand donating that much clearly isn’t healthy if you aren’t in excellent shape yourself. Do it too much will will make you more anemic and increase your overall fatigue, weakens your immune system, can lead to scarring in your elbows and a fuck ton of other lower chance but more serious complications.
This is a great question to use because how many of these people have given their smartphone location permissions? Google knows when they speed already.