This is a question the entire fediverse needs to wrangle with. On the one hand, advertising has had an unquestionably negative impact on the Internet. On the other, these services DO cost money to run. While in a perfect world donations would cover everything, the reality is most users of the platforms/communities aren't paying to support them. If we don't all figure this out, it's going to be hard for the fediverse to scale. Would love to hear ideas in the comments!
https://fortune.com/2022/11/28/twitter-advertisers-elon-musk-mastodon-ads-brands/
@tilvids I am good with ads but I don't want them to be targeted to me beyond the instance I'm on.
Good, quiet and tasteful ads catered to the instance they are posted on would be okay, IMHO.
Of course, I'd rather no ads at all but we have to be realistic.
It does seem like a civilized and polite way of doing things.
The nice thing is, most instances will probably need in the hundreds to thousands of dollars a month, not the tens of millions of dollars a month, to reach a point of equilibrium. Should scale well enough.
@fssofdeath @tilvids This, this is the solution. Instance manually reviewd ads. They are displayed to only the users instance even of looking at federated sources.