Many sites already exist to sell products (like Temu) or a paid subscription (like Dropbox), such that ads or crypto miners would just be double-dipping. On ave

Many sites already exist to sell products (like Temu) or a paid subscription (like Dropbox), such that ads or crypto miners would just be double-dipping. On average, you would need to pay less than you do now if resources were not wasted on ads/crypto miners. For websites that aren't costly to host (blogs, tutorials, ...), there's often no need to monetize at all. Non-commercial sites on some topic ran by passionate hobbyists are already typically higher quality than sites designed for profiting through adspam/SEO. Donations and volunteer work (like Wikipedia) can be viable where there are non-negligible costs to cover. Grants and public funding can also help if it's a worthwhile cause. Some institutions/people benefit indirectly in recognition from putting information online - like universities, product support forums, or a security researcher writing up an investigation into a malware campaign. Could consider this a form of advertising, but the resources are being used in a productive way rather than just intentionally wasting time. Non-wasteful use of your time and computing resources are also fine by me, like torrent trackers that require you to maintain a minimum seed ratio. Google's CAPTCHAs are already sneakily giving you annotation work, just not paying for it. I'd claim federation also helps, in that services that ostensibly benefit from being one massive site (due to network effect) can actually be split up into smaller more feasible nodes. I use SDF's Mastodon/Lemmy instances for example, and host a Matrix server.