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I can imagine a model of ethical, user opt-in ad service, which could be privacy aware and still allow monetizing. Users could actively subscribe topics of goods-services they are interested in, as to sponsored account, or in even more anonymised, rss-like way (techies surely know more appropriate methods).
I would subscribe to some ethical and relevant for me ads, especially if it helped sustain and develop a platform.
What a terrible opinion to have.
Why? Could you please add some arguments to your harsh judgement?
The fediverse was intended to be the opposite of the ad infested enshittified internet. Inserting ads would turn it into the same shit.
Wanting to receive 'relevant' ads is wanting to have personal information harvested, since that is the only way to make that work. That necessity is what led to google goong from a useful, minimal search engine into the enshittified mess that it is now.
Wanting users to actively engage in ads is even worse. Just wanting to get fucked over by corporate interests, just begging for the whole thing lean into sponsored content pushing out any user created content and eventually requiring draconian moderation and centralization to appease corporate interests because that is what always happens. There are no ethical and relevant ads. Relevant ads cannot be ethical
Your opinion is what led streaming services to change from affordable and easy fo access in netflix to ad infested, shittily designed and poorly run streaming sevices. Wanting ads to be added to a free community supported network of instances means you want the whole thing to turn to shit. There is no other possible outcome.
Thanks for detailing. I also witnessed what happened, but I tend to blame corporate surveillance capitalism instead demonizing the very concept of ads.
Firstly, ads are information of value exchange, which itself has value. Even anarchists need to exchange goods and services.
Also, enthusiasm-based services die, because volunteers get tired, retire or find new exciting projects. They need money or other value to keep working in the long term. And we want them to.
Now, can there be a different system of ads, which would not enshittify it all? I think there can be, maybe it isnt yet created.
From the user perspective, I can imagine an option in server settings, letting me switch on some ads to support its upkeep. It would let me tick some boxes, e.g. only handmade fishing gear and personal IT assistance (whoever the sponsors are). It could be served passively like rss, with no tracking - but the server owners could be paid by estimates, like tv does. Or maybe even some ethical cryptography is possible in the open source system.
Maybe not exactly like that, but you get my line of thinking. Because there is also another type of enshitification: open source projects get abandoned, broken and die just like commercial ones.
Yes, there are donations, but most of us can afford to make only so much of them.
Therefore I prefer to think about reinventing and reclaiming system of honourable advertising, instead of extracting unpaid labor from all those volunteers until they quit.
Not in the context of for profit business. Ads for free (mostly funded through taxes) services like libraries, sure. But they aren't selling anything, they are purely for awareness. Once money is involved the incentive to become worse over time is part of advertising.
The fediverse already exists without ads. It is built to grow by increasing the number of instances. Advertising would encourage fewer instances through competition.
Fucking LO L
FYI enshittification means becoming shitty in the pursuit of squeezing any bit of money at the user's expense. It was a specific form of this originally, but it still means becoming shitty because of capitalist motivations. Abandoned open source software is shitty, but it is not enshittification. It can also be forked and continued by someone else.
Future will tell. Id like to find out that you are right and fediverse will prevail without monetisation. Yet its growth seem really sluggish so far.
The world needs decent communication ecosystem, we need less manipulated societies at least for democracies to work. Fedi has a potential to be a world changing project, not just another irc-type cave of geeks.
You are right that enshitiffication does not quite fit here, as by Doctorow, it also involves reaching market dominance, which is a prerequisite to squeezing more velue and simultaneously offering less. Getting paid for your work is a far cry from market dominance :) It is just fair.