Personally? I don't think there will ever be a way to monetize it without any downsides to whatever funding model you picked.
When I grew up, the web was composed of a lot of passion projects such as fansites, programming blogs, and of course, porn ;) Lots of people hosted these on their little baby home servers. There was a vast diversity of websites that you could find and discover. I'm hoping with big tech cratering due to enshittification, it will go back to that, but I'm not optimistic.