hot take: community ads are good as hell. i remember back in my SA forum days banner ads were pretty cheap for forum members, so you'd see just simple little ads on the top of the page either for small businesses/people who were trying to sell something, or people would just buy ad space to put a stupid joke up or something.
there was also project wonderful, if anyone remembers that? it was this weird little auction-based banner site. this was back in the day where webpages were allowed to get more that two hits a day, so a lot of people had their own site, especially webcomic people. basically you just had a "your ad here" thing on your site, and people would auction how much they're willing to pay per day/click/whatever, and set a budget for when they would want to stop spending money on your spot. there's criticisms to this approach, but functionally what it meant was anybody who had any amount of money could find SOMEWHERE they could take out an ad, and anyone who had a site could make a little bit off of it.
at best you ended up with the same thing as what SA had going, websites where you'd see a bunch of smaller businesses/creators/whoever instead of weird crap for crypto scams, plus sometimes people would just make a stupid joke and spend a hundred bucks slapping it on a bunch of websites for a day.
in conclusion, cohost i know you're real big on no advertising, but i'd be totally down for opting-in to some sort of system where other users could say "hey look at my furry art page" or "greg smells like ants" on my sidebar. the end.