Individual instances could theoretically monetize if their owners wished, they could show you ads, sell your data, sell you merch, sell the instance to a third party, all the same strategies as any other internet institution.
The Fediverse as a whole cannot, though, due to its decentralized ownership and development structure.
They’d need to grow big enough to turn off federation without much loss.
They could always do unidirectional federation and only take feeds from others but not send their updates out and make it walled off for a subscription.
I think there is an arms race with content moderation that even if the instance is not themselves trying to monetize, clever and unscrupulous ad agencies will slip ads into feeds under the guise of actual content. I think it’s a big reason Reddit went to shit even before it went public.
How do you separate a user who innocently includes McDonald’s into a post or comment from someone doing so with the intention of driving revenue? (Do you want some fries now?)
It’s probably already the case now just the ‘ads’ are mostly all political shit. Same idea just with a top-down political agenda rather than driving sales. They have all the public fediverse data to base their strategies on already.
I think this issue is just handwaved away with “oh go to a different instance” but we’re here for content ultimately and not all instances have what we’re looking for. Ad agencies are going to be able to adapt to a changing landscape like that because it’s literally their full time jobs/careers.
Now you made me feel bad because I posted something about McDonalds.
And now I have real and absolutely unpaid craving for some cheeseburger and fries and leader cola… I hope they have leader cola!
I think you’re right. The line blurring between corporate sponsorship and community support is pretty difficult to determine. If someone wants to build a community around a particular video game or movie or television show, of course the corporation that publishes it benefits from a bunch of positive discussion about it. But at the same time, that corporate-owned product is part of our shared culture, and a legitimate topic to discuss in a forum like this.
And it’s not even necessarily pure corporate stuff, either. There are nonprofit and trade and governmental organizations that rely on advertising for public messaging: a tourism board promoting their location as a good vacation spot, an agricultural trade group promoting recipes using their specific product, a government health department drive encouraging vaccinations, etc. They pay for ads through conventional outlets while also promoting their interests on social media.
It’s just an ecosystem. We should be aware that there are those who would seek to influence us here, whether for money or politics or other motivation, and navigate these spaces with that in mind.
I already pay a few bucks a month into the kitty for this instance, because I’d rather be out the price of a coffee than deal with corporate bullshit, AI, the algorithm, and GD motherfucking ads.
I and not nocking the creators or admins but have you ever wondered what they do with that money?
Genuine question to you: do you seriously think that data bandwidth, drive space, and domain ownership are all free?
No that is why I donated one of my paychecks. So they could buy a server
They’ve given info on that before.
They spend it.
That’s only partially a joke. It pretty much all goes to keeping the instance running right.
Nope.
What do you mean? Do you think that at everywhere and for everything you buy? It’s not a charity
No but I just want to see money well spent. Including my money.
It would because of server costs
100% certainty. the data gleemed from the content produced by a lively community is valuable to data mining and marketing. once an instance makes their radar, they will want a pipe into it. whether they pay the instance owner, the ISP/cloud it sits on, or just copy the data maliciously, they’ll get it and sell it. and then have a plan to manipulate it / sell to that user pool as well.
it’s “natural” (for assholes) to do this. seems to happen everywhere, but lemmy and fediverse are prone to it for now.
Yes it would be monetized, by a swimsuit calendar of each Lemmy user.
I hope so, but I’d also want them to be a registered non-profit or not-for-profit entity.
Just cover your bills and pay out bonuses to the people doing the work (including moderators)
Definitely. At least the damage could be largely limited to just that instance though. I can’t seriously imagine the people behind it letting their ideals trump profit for an extended period of time, especially with financial imperatives from the costs associated with the infrastructure required if that one instance alone had so much traffic.
Theoretically though, if it started going rancid it’d be much easier to jump ship without losing out on too much, that is unless they defederate with everyone or everyone defederates with them, either of which could be distinct possibilities. In that case, I guess you’d just have another Reddit.
Well I would like it to make reddit its bitch. And to be the biggest instance in all of the fediveres
I think you might be misunderstanding the whole advantage of the fediverse idea in the first place.
They can go the route of The Onion and sell annual memberships. People will pay if it offers value and keeps ads out.
It would possibly be enshittified like others. The whole purpose of decentralization would be broken and it would become one single centralized website.
This is why I advise people to lead people to other instances than lemmy.world. That instance is getting too big and the other instances aren’t. We instead should balance the user count in all instances. And possibly finish the implementation to own content in a decentralized fashion using DIDs. That will need something like the blockchain though, so perhaps we could also have a fediverse coin as a bonus? lol
I can imagine a model of ethical, user opt-in ad service, which could be privacy aware and still allow monetizing. Users could actively subscribe topics of goods-services they are interested in, as to sponsored account, or in even more anonymised, rss-like way (techies surely know more appropriate methods).
I would subscribe to some ethical and relevant for me ads, especially if it helped sustain and develop a platform.
I would subscribe to some ethical and relevant for me ads, especially if it helped sustain and develop a platform.
What a terrible opinion to have.
Why? Could you please add some arguments to your harsh judgement?
The fediverse was intended to be the opposite of the ad infested enshittified internet. Inserting ads would turn it into the same shit.
Wanting to receive ‘relevant’ ads is wanting to have personal information harvested, since that is the only way to make that work. That necessity is what led to google goong from a useful, minimal search engine into the enshittified mess that it is now.
Wanting users to actively engage in ads is even worse. Just wanting to get fucked over by corporate interests, just begging for the whole thing lean into sponsored content pushing out any user created content and eventually requiring draconian moderation and centralization to appease corporate interests because that is what always happens. There are no ethical and relevant ads. Relevant ads cannot be ethical
Your opinion is what led streaming services to change from affordable and easy fo access in netflix to ad infested, shittily designed and poorly run streaming sevices. Wanting ads to be added to a free community supported network of instances means you want the whole thing to turn to shit. There is no other possible outcome.
Thanks for detailing. I also witnessed what happened, but I tend to blame corporate surveillance capitalism instead demonizing the very concept of ads.
Firstly, ads are information of value exchange, which itself has value. Even anarchists need to exchange goods and services.
Also, enthusiasm-based services die, because volunteers get tired, retire or find new exciting projects. They need money or other value to keep working in the long term. And we want them to.
Now, can there be a different system of ads, which would not enshittify it all? I think there can be, maybe it isnt yet created.
From the user perspective, I can imagine an option in server settings, letting me switch on some ads to support its upkeep. It would let me tick some boxes, e.g. only handmade fishing gear and personal IT assistance (whoever the sponsors are). It could be served passively like rss, with no tracking - but the server owners could be paid by estimates, like tv does. Or maybe even some ethical cryptography is possible in the open source system.
Maybe not exactly like that, but you get my line of thinking. Because there is also another type of enshitification: open source projects get abandoned, broken and die just like commercial ones.
Yes, there are donations, but most of us can afford to make only so much of them.
Therefore I prefer to think about reinventing and reclaiming system of honourable advertising, instead of extracting unpaid labor from all those volunteers until they quit.
Now, can there be a different system of ads, which would not enshittify it all? I think there can be, maybe it isnt yet created.
Not in the context of for profit business. Ads for free (mostly funded through taxes) services like libraries, sure. But they aren’t selling anything, they are purely for awareness. Once money is involved the incentive to become worse over time is part of advertising.
The fediverse already exists without ads. It is built to grow by increasing the number of instances. Advertising would encourage fewer instances through competition.
honourable advertising
Fucking LO L
FYI enshittification means becoming shitty in the pursuit of squeezing any bit of money at the user’s expense. It was a specific form of this originally, but it still means becoming shitty because of capitalist motivations. Abandoned open source software is shitty, but it is not enshittification. It can also be forked and continued by someone else.
Future will tell. Id like to find out that you are right and fediverse will prevail without monetisation. Yet its growth seem really sluggish so far.
The world needs decent communication ecosystem, we need less manipulated societies at least for democracies to work. Fedi has a potential to be a world changing project, not just another irc-type cave of geeks.
You are right that enshitiffication does not quite fit here, as by Doctorow, it also involves reaching market dominance, which is a prerequisite to squeezing more velue and simultaneously offering less. Getting paid for your work is a far cry from market dominance :) It is just fair.
