I’ll start:
- Some significant portion of funds go towards development of the Lemmy software. 80%? Rest goes to lemmy instance hosting.
- Ads are reasonable and non-intrusive (no popups etc)
- People can still browse w/ an adblocker
I personally would gladly turn off my adblocker if I knew the ads were supporting development. Hell, I might even click a few!
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.