Respectfully, if you can't afford something, then you shouldn't consume it. Ads are a nice way for creators to get paid for the time they put into creating the thing without requiring their customers to actually fork out money. If you don't want to fork out money AND you don't want to watch ads, then you need to just not consume that media. Anything else is not fair to the content creator.
Regarding your edit: people are answering the question you posed in your post title, not necessarily giving you advice about how you should do it.
What makes you think there is any correlation between being able to sign up for Lemmy and knowing anything about artificial sweeteners? Those two things seem completely unrelated to me.
huh... I was wondering why it was down all the time!
I think you've hit the nail on the head... many of us grew up using Windows and/or Mac. Incremental changes to the OS aren't a hindrance because of the baseline familiarity with the OS. Without OS familiarity, you're going to feel like a fish out of water.
I'm getting better with linux, but I still daily drive on a Windows machine and I'm not sure if that will ever change.
Respectfully I don't think what I've written here is appropriate for official documentation, mostly because I don't know what I'm talking about. My hope is that somebody who DOES know what they are talking about could use this as a starting point for updating the documentation.
No, I don't know exactly what version lemmy is using... but I know that version 5.3 works. I had read elsewhere that lemmy 0.18 began using bootstrap 5.2 or something like that. What's written on the wiki is definitely wrong.
I've installed dart-sass (instructions here) on my machine, and then ran the compiler on my scss file. I get the following error
Error: Can't find stylesheet to import.
╷
1 │ @import "./variables";
│ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^
╵
_variables.tk.scss 1:9 @import
tk.scss 1:9 root stylesheet
Where can I find the _variables.scss file that it's looking for?
Is that included in the lemmy install?
I'm not sure I follow what you mean by "If the viewer watches the ad, the ad buyer does not receive a return on investment." Doesn't the ad buyer want the viewer to watch the ad?
In any case, my comment was in the context of the OP, which is specifically concerned about the creator making money. If you care about the creator making money (and you should), then you have to either watch ads or pay them directly (via patreon, e.g.).
I have to admit that I have a sore spot for this subject. I believe (at least in America) that people are far too comfortable with the idea that we should be able to consume art for free. Obviously paying less is better than paying more from a personal finance perspective (and paying nothing is best!). However, it's quite clear that the distribution platforms are more interested in making a profit than they are in compensating creators fairly (some are better than others, of course). If the distribution platforms are stiffing the creators, and the consumers are paying little or nothing, then it's the creator left with the short end of the stick.
Generally speaking, creators just want their creations to be seen/heard because they care MOST about the art, not the money. Unfortunately, this often leaves them making less than they deserve for the value they create. Who benefits from this price/value disparity? The distribution platforms. I think if most people thought about this arrangement for a little bit, they would probably prefer that the creator gets more money and the distribution platforms get less.
However, I don't think that's the whole story. Distribution platforms need to make some money to cover the expenses of running the platform. I think it's entirely likely that the cost paid (via ad impressions) doesn't actually cover the TOTAL expense of paying the distribution platform overhead AS WELL AS fairly compensating the creator.
All that is to say, when you think about art in a producer/consumer context, it makes the most economic sense for the consumer to pay the producer. This circles back to my original premise: people are far too comfortable with the idea that we should be able to consume art for free. If we could get ourselves into the mindset that art is valuable and therefore should cost some money, I think we'd have a much more vibrant art culture.