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.
snooggums@midwest.social 3 months ago
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
dudenas@lemmy.ml 3 months ago
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.