You are naive if you think paying them prevents them from getting more payments by selling your data wherever they can get away with tricking you into consent.
Well yeah this presupposes that management knows what the fuck they're doing.
Which is vanishingly rare. It happens sometimes though. I worked at a small 12 man shop that had an engineer CEO who valued doing things right. Very refreshing.
Yeah, lemmy is insanely illogical on this topic. Services cost money to run, and the average user is not going to self host anytime in the foreseeable future. I have yet to hear anybody offer a vision of how things might reasonably work without ads OR subscriptions.
The argument as far as I can tell is "FOSS means I don't have to pay anything because it doesn't cost anything! If they ask for donations they don't mean me"
Not a single one of them have a monthly contribution to their instance though. Guaran-fucking-tee it.
Asking $12/yr for software seems like pulling teeth to some.
That may be your problem. We don't ask for anything specific. We simply make a post with how much the service costs and how much users have donated. Users are smart and can take things from there.