If you charge, you also have to offer a better experience than the free options. There's no reason instances can't use ads for people unwilling or unable to pay. For me I'll gladly pay for an ad-free experience.

[–] Endymion_Mallorn@kbin.melroy.org 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The reason they can't show ads is actually pretty simple: if I'm going to have ads in my feed, I'm just going to go back to Reddit for the same experience. Plus, when you consider dbzer0 et al, you're going to come to the conclusion that ads will either be a waste because everyone is using a strong adblock on Firefox or a browser that doesn't care about Google manifest standards, or the people who see them will be incredibly pissed, leave the instance, and either return to Reddit (or an alternative) or move instances and make a lot of noise toward defed'ing from the ad-ridden instance.

For me, I would rather just run an adblock and an anti-adblock-blocker on a different service than go through the frustration of ads on a non-corp platform.

[–] Steve 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

It sounds like you're thinking there is no way to compete with Reddit. If you charge, people will use Reddit. If you have ads, people will use Reddit. People are only here because there aren't ads and it's free?

[–] Endymion_Mallorn@kbin.melroy.org 3 points 1 day ago

That's basically correct, yes. I don't see the fediverse platform(s) as being "special" compared to others. Sure, there's political and social momentum that keeps people here, especially due to anticorporate causes. People are here because they got ticked about the Reddit API changes, the ads, and the monetization (Reddit Gold, etc).

If any of those things change, people will see that they're not getting the value they were looking for, and will go back.