Well, that’s the death of the free* forum. Went from BBS to newsgroups to phpBB to Reddit, each soft-killing its predecessor. But like WalMart killing Main Street, Reddit is going to kill the free forum.
Thank goodness for Lemmy and other free* social network software.
*free with the asterisk because we know it’s not free, we are enjoying the service that others volunteer to pay for.
Lemmy will need ads to support individual servers, eventually, when they’re not attached to another org (like a server CNN would run for just outgoing news dissemination). The rest of them, with bills and needing to eat, may need to go to ads.
I support proper ads that do not get priority placement and aren’t in-your-face.
I support prioritization of profile migration so we can vote with our feet if a particular server’s ad volume and content offends our sensibilities.
But I’m just saying I fully expect some ads are gonna happen, and I hope we can prevent full enshittification when that happens.
No, it will never have ads. If the devs put ads in, it will get forked. If server admins put in ads, they will be defederated. That’s nonnegotiable if you want a free (as in libre) fediverse.
Mastodon is way bigger than Lemmy and it doesn’t need ads. Donations and subscriptions (for severs that choose that path) are enough.
It’ll be the porn they charge for.
They know only wankers will give them money.
What’s funny about that is Reddit is mostly just an advertising front for onlyfans at this point
