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As an instance admin having to post ads is literally my worst nightmare. Honestly, I might just throw in the towel if that ever becomes necessary.

Do not ever open that Pandora’s box willingly. The cash advertisers give you is a honeypot, it’s something that ensnares you and sends you down a rabbit hole of “targeting” on which a whole industry of surveillance has been built in the past decades, one which you would slowly and inevitably be forced to join. On the scale of the entire internet, we need to grow up, learn to say no.

If large instances get to a point where their staff cannot afford to host them, we can maybe chip in if needed. It’s already happening a lot on Lemmy and it’s great to see that – but honestly, it’s just also not that expensive to run the platform. I hope that doesn’t change in the future.

In the long run, it’s less expensive to chip in than to watch ads. Those ads only work if they do actually have an effect on your spending (and I worked with marketing experts, you can trust them to meticulously track every single dime your site brings in for them), so you’re still making people spend money, but now you make them spend money on someone else’s product because that someone else will give you a small share, as opposed to having them spend that money directly with you. And that spending not only has to pay for the service you provide, it also has to pay for an entire industry fine-tuning the best methods to waste people’s time and deteriorate their attention spans to send them down a rabbit hole for what they should buy – in the end, you’re literally making the user experience worse and having your users pay for it.

There is only one business advantage in ads: they are a form of forced revenue. When you ask someone to buy something or donate, you’re asking for their consent. When you shove an ad in their face you’re ignoring that, and they need to resort to adblockers to gain back the control you’ve taken from them. Which is also one of the many reasons I don’t ever want to see ads on the fediverse.

I don’t see someone who uses the fediverse being open to ads and instead leaving for an instance that doesn’t have it. Reason being that blocking ads is also seen as a necessary part of secure browsing. A Facebook run one would do it, but I’m not using an instance or community that Facebook is running. I’d be using Facebook if I was fine with that.

I don’t see it becoming a thing. You might run into an instance here or there that does it, but it’s going to be a very difficult market. Advertisers want to be confident in reaching people that will buy things.

That’s the entire reason Google tracks the fuck out of everything. They can sell ads that are precisely targeted to maximize returns. That’s part of why reddit wants to push everyone to their own app. Facebook does it, Amazon does it.

But for that to happen on lemmy, an instance can’t just spool up the source and slap ads into it randomly. Nobody is going to buy ad space on a single lemmy instance without ad targeting. And it would need to be a pretty damn huge instance even then.

Since lemmy is a project from some strongly anti-capitalist people, they’re never going to make it easy either. Anyone else wanting to add ads to their instance is going to have to fork it, or use a fork. And guess what’s going to happen once they do.

Bye-bye federation. They’ll get delisted left and right. Just as a matter of principle. Lemmy is overall very rejecting of corporate enshittification, especially right now. It will take years before the culture will shift enough for an ad based monetization to not get rejected soundly.

Also, yeah, servers have costs. But at the scale of a lemmy instance, most of the ones that are sharing their numbers are in the low thousands at the high end. The smaller ones are in the low hundreds. And that’s yearly, not monthly. So, again, it’ll be years before there’s even a need for the kind of monetization that would make ad sales an option.

And when monetization is an issue? There’s still going to be small instances that don’t need it. So it isn’t like the fediverse is going to collapse into a corporate shit spiral as long as it’s on open source software, federated, and so (relatively) easy to set up.

I’m not against ads. Never have been, though im damn sure against shitty ads that get in the way of doing what I’m on the site/service to do. It’s why I don’t use YouTube unless it’s revanced; the ads are too damn invasive. I grew up with nothing but broadcast tv until well into the eighties because cable didn’t reach here. And even after that, cable had plenty of ads.

But lemmy? If there’s ever any significant ad presence, it’ll be a decade or more from now.

I don’t see them going the “Promoted post” or pinned ads route. Maybe some ads in the sidebar if necessary.