I don’t really see how. If they tried to charge you, why wouldn’t you just join another instance? You’d still see the same stuff. Unless they de-federated, (and I only barely know what I’m talking about here) and became a privately owned site, but then, they’d lose all the content from other instances, which people would flock to immediately.
The thing is, in a scenario where it’s as big as Reddit in terms of users, most of the content on the fediverse then would be local to them so if they defederated everyone or everyone defederated them, who’d really be cut off from whom? They’d probably only be marginally less appealing to their user base who might not even know how the whole fediverse thing worked anyway.
It could be monetized by showing regular ads next to content a and disguised adds as content. Also, if using the federated API, they could push some sponsored content desgized as such.
This cannoy be applied to the whole fediverse but only to instances whose owners a want monetization.
I am sure that if implemented, someone would make it work on mobile apps and others while showing a setting to “disable ads”. And there would be forks that block adds by default etc.
I don’t really see how. If they tried to charge you, why wouldn’t you just join another instance? You’d still see the same stuff. Unless they de-federated, (and I only barely know what I’m talking about here) and became a privately owned site, but then, they’d lose all the content from other instances, which people would flock to immediately.
The thing is, in a scenario where it’s as big as Reddit in terms of users, most of the content on the fediverse then would be local to them so if they defederated everyone or everyone defederated them, who’d really be cut off from whom? They’d probably only be marginally less appealing to their user base who might not even know how the whole fediverse thing worked anyway.
It could be monetized by showing regular ads next to content a and disguised adds as content. Also, if using the federated API, they could push some sponsored content desgized as such.
This cannoy be applied to the whole fediverse but only to instances whose owners a want monetization.
I am sure that if implemented, someone would make it work on mobile apps and others while showing a setting to “disable ads”. And there would be forks that block adds by default etc.
Maybe have a look. At what Threads are doing.
At least one lemmy app already has ads.
Ads doesn’t need to be part of the fediverse to be displayed alongside the content.