I’m not sure how recently you’ve used it but I actually find chrome to be much more resource hungry. Maybe it’s worth a try again if you haven’t?

Then what about ads by default but you can pay to remove it? I think it’s important to think about the cost structure of these “free” spaces so that they have the proper support for longevity. That being said, I feel Wikipedia is a fine example of how we could also do it, donations with some transparency on what’s needed to keep things running. But iono, I’m pretty ignorant about the true cost of running something like lemmy at scale.