(original thread starts at https://tech.lgbt/@silvermoon82/109325175432086325)
I imagine there’s some huge panic going on in the ad industry right now; birbsite was, until last month, one of the major outlets for advertising, but a) advertisers don’t want to appear beside Nazi shit, and b) the eyeballs are moving to the “Lawless hellscape of no use to anybody for advertising”.
It would be mind-bogglingly difficult to build an ethical ad platform that would be accepted by the Fedi community. Maybe impossible.
But.
Now is the time.
Eventually, ads will come to fedi. They pretty much have to; we live in a capitalist hellworld, and the growth in users will shift the demographic towards people more used to ads and less used to mutual aid. It’ll start with big commercial instances, but in time I think it will become normalized.
If we don’t want Google to set the standards for advertising on Fedi, we will have to do it ourselves.
Here’s what I think we need, at minimum, for an ad platform to be accepted here (your thoughts are welcome! I’m just airing out my capitalism-poisoned brainworms here):
- surveillance-free, old-school content based
- advertisers can be curated at the instance/site level, as well as filtered/blocked by users
- community feedback (a “this ad is bad” button with an optional “and here’s why”)
In the meantime, your instance owner probably has a Patreon or something; if you can, throw them a few dollars.
Money is the root of all^H^H^H most evil, but it’s also the key to bandwidth and electricity.
