Being an idiot in a hurry, I saw the medication Warfarin

Look for Signage Displays. They’re basically TVs with different software.

It sounds like you’re thinking there is no way to compete with Reddit. If you charge, people will use Reddit. If you have ads, people will use Reddit. People are only here because there aren’t ads and it’s free?

If you charge, you also have to offer a better experience than the free options. There’s no reason instances can’t use ads for people unwilling or unable to pay. For me I’ll gladly pay for an ad-free experience.

That’s not really how it works. If it was made to work that way, it would still be a relatively small group donating their own compute resources to subsidize everyone else. Which is what we already have, and isn’t very scalable.

The only real option is to charge people.
Hosting isn’t free. It costs money to run a website. That money needs to come from somewhere. If it doesn’t come from advertisers, it must come from users.

There could be a verity options for that. But I like the simple annual subscription. Each and every user pays. Spread out the cost as much as possible. It’s only fair.