this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2023
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I see two misconceptions here.
First off, there is such a thing as reasonable ads, namely, ones you want to see. Sometimes you are looking to purchase something or some service, and you have to go out of your way to look for options. Ads for what you want, when you want is ideal. However, the point where advertising goes to far is trying to solve this problem by learning everything about you in order to effectively read your mind. That's where it becomes unreasonable for me.
Second, the philosophy of lemmy (and federation in general) was not to tell all instances and users of said instances how they should use the internet, it was to give them the freedom to use the internet however they want, without sacrificing the connection with others who want to use it differently. It would not be equivalent to using reddit, because an instance that serves ads would have to compete with other instances who don't. Whereas reddit is a walled garden where you are forced to take their ads along with their content, if a lemmy instance with ads became too "unreasonable", the users have nothing to lose by leaving, the content is all federated.
The reality is, it's not a matter if, but when we will see instances who try to fund themselves using ads. They're free to serve them and you're free to defederate from them in protest. That is the lemmy philosophy.
There are no ads I want to see. If I am looking to make a purchase I will specifically seek it out. There is no advertising for anything I want that is acceptable.
Implementing ads is more against the philosophy of free and open source software than it is with Lemmy or any piece of FOSS software specifically. As for Lemmy we just won't see any ads on Lemmy.ml in particular which is run by the Lemmy developers. It's also not entirely true that there is nothing to lose by just cutting off the Lemmy instance that starts implementing ads if people start getting to attached to specific communities or user accounts of theirs. It would be nice if Lemmy had some kind of community and user migration to mitigate this risk.
You can say what you believe the "philosophy of the fediverse/foss" is until you're blue in the face, but there's literally nothing in place to enforce what you're saying except for the users. Someone could start an ad supported instance tomorrow, and if people use it, then they use it. The Lemmy devs can't compel them to remove ads, that's not part of the license (afaik, I'd be glad to be proven wrong), nor would they compel instances to defederate from them. That is the opposite of the fediverse philosophy.
I'm getting down voted for acknowledging reality, but it is my firm belief that the moment we ignore this reality is the moment someone steps in and exploits it. In order to maintain the fediverse as we want it, it takes a user base that prioritizes choosing instances that don't serve ads over ones that do, and not a user base that thinks ad supported instances aren't possible. Meta's Threads was an obvious attempt, and I'm glad that most instances unanimously agreed they were antithetical to Lemmy, but it won't always be that easy.
And I 100% agree that migration of communities and accounts between instances should be top of the list of Lemmy features. Without that, then yes, as you say, any communities/accounts on that instance are lost, or worse, keep users on an instance that hurts the community. But even still, unlike reddit, that would only amount to a small subset of communities/users, and not 100% of them.
I agree there is nothing stopping someone from starting an instance with ads. It's just that the overlap of people that agree with such a thing and are enthusiasts of free and open source software must be very niche.
I'm also not suggesting the devs could or should do anything about it. I'm just saying it isn't something they would do. It would be worth determining which license is being used, but I doubt it is one that prohibits commercialization of Lemmy.
At any rate I don't think such an instance would survive as the type of user that would agree with both ads and Foss is limited. It is unlikely to ever become a real issue.
My hope is that Lemmy/the fediverse can survive growth beyond just the tech enthusiast demographic, though. I would prefer to see the platform be the best option for social media for everyone, and not just one that makes compromises to maintain privacy for people who are interested in that sort of thing.
In 50 years I don't want to see the lion's share of content still being generated and only existing on proprietary platforms. I would much rather it be in openly accessible ones.
And given the power that ads have at monetizing platforms that are otherwise unmonetizable, as the platform grows, it's inevitable that we will see instances start to leverage them.
Then our goals are fundamentally at odds. My hope for the future is the minimization or elimination of the ad driven internet. I'd rather see Lemmy die than succumb to ads and commercialization.
In 50 years from now maybe we will have found a better way. Perhaps instead of leaving the idea of social media and the Internets "public square" to corporations we could fund it in a more socialized way and have it be some kind of tax expense. I don't want to see companies profiting off the simple act of communicating online forever. Maybe in the past it was novel enough to be a real technological hurdle that could only be done with privatized companies, but at some point I think it should be more like a public utility.
I feel that you're still misunderstanding me. I have never said that my goal is an ad driven internet.
I would not be against govts running publicly funded fediverse servers, and I would not be against public funding going toward fediverse and open source projects, but I hope we would agree that we would not want the fediverse to be "owned" by any govt. The ability to run your own instance free from any govt control is vitally important.
Publicly owned servers introduce a new set of difficulties too. Unlike privately owned platforms, things like freedom of speech would actually need to be guaranteed. But that doesn't mean you want any random account to be able to spread any info it wants, which would make the platform a target for manipulation. I would guess most publicly owned servers would thus resort to deanonymization to simplify the challenge of moderation. Which I wouldn't be interested in.
The issue with your first point is that in order to be served ads you actually want to see, the provider (instance admin) needs to know what you like and that way leads to tracking scripts.
That's not "the issue" with my first point, that IS my first point.
In a perfect world, a "reasonable ad" shows you exactly what you're looking for, without leaking any information about yourself. I understand that it's tempting to say that's not possible, but "proof by not being able to think of a solution" isn't a proof, that's why I'm hesitant to make such a strong claim.
Zero Knowledge proofs were thought of as impossible until it turned out they weren't. Can someone serve "Zero Knowledge ads"? Maybe one day, idk.
Even if you don't like ads, you can't deny that they're a powerful means of funding projects that otherwise can't be sustainably monetized. We learned this lesson 20 years ago when the first federated internet platform hit the mainstream: the world wide web. So imo there's no reason to think the fediverse isn't about to relearn the same lesson.
It's entirely possible, I agree, but as of right now, there's only really two ways to show a person ads - targeted or not targeted. And that applies to all forms of advertising really, not just online. I don't know enough about marketing to say how long it might take to develop zero knowledge ads but in terms of funding development and hosting we're very long way away from that being a possibility.
And the ethos of the Fediverse was, in part, formed around the idea of not being served ads that were either utterly irrelevant and thus irritating or scarily relevant and thus unsettling. The Fediverse is pretty closely aligned with open source and privacy philosophy. I think any instance that runs ads is going to see either no revenue as they'll be adblocked or the instance will see a sharp drop off in users.
What part of "no" do you not understand?
No one wants ads. Conversation over.