Was just thinking how nice it is to be on social media and not be bombarded with ads!
Its amazing how this is the first site in years that I dont need to install blockers or scroll through bs or be so cynical with what I read.
Fellow Australians, rejoice in this little space we have from corporate bombardment
It’s much more cost-effective, for everyone involved, in a decentralized platform. All those big company server costs are broken up into dozens eventually hundreds and thousands of different servers just like World Wide Web itself, with websites for each community, right? Communities chip in to buy Little League shirts for their town baseball teams, we set up websites for our book sales and bake sales, school PTAs are able to accomplish great things because their parent communities can afford to help in smaller circles.
Decentralization doesn’t just decentralize the data. It also decentralizes the semantics, the funding, etc.
This is very true, but there’s still going to be some large instances and some small instances and the large ones will have to deal with it at some point. It’s not the end of the world or anything, there’s a myriad of ways of dealing with it but I would expect some of the larger instances to end up with some pretty hefty bills that’ll need paying. Hopefully the communities on those instances will help, but if not then we might start seeing ads appearing or sponsored content or whatever.
I would hope, like you say, those larger instances would naturally realize larger donations with the higher user volume.
But sure, each instance can make the choice to inject ads in their users’ feeds. Larger instances may have promos with companies like video game publishers or movie studios. But I think the natural infrastructure that the Fediverse provides, limits this from the crazy ad levels we see in today’s failing mainstream, centralized social media companies.