Is Mastodon (a decentralised ad-free Twitter alternative) the messiah we need?

"It started last week when Twitter suspended the account of Delhi-based Dalit poet Dilip Mandal, after he accused Twitter of being casteist in its account verification process. Supreme Court advocate Sanjay Hegde’s account was also suspended twice in a month: once for posting a satirical poem and then for posting an anti-fascist photograph."
Some users then proposed Mastodon as an alternative. It seemed like an easy switch: The website has a Twitter-like interface complete with character-limits and hashtags. User tweets are called “toots", retweets become “boosts". Where it differs is that it’s open-source, decentralized and allows users to create private networks called “instances" based on mutual interest groups. It carries no advertisements and claims to have robust systems in place to protect users against harassment and hate speech. https://squeet.me/objects/962c3e105fa802ac14c2f0289f9b6e5446691422

@danie10 While qoto and many other instances are ad free I'm not sure calling it ad free is fair. MS for example, the flagship instance, is riddled with advertisements just as bad as what we see on twitter.

@danie10 Ok so its decentralized ads, not sure thats any better. In fact its worse at least with normal ads my ad blocker works.

@danie10 There are tons, MS does not prohibit advertisements in their stream. Not sure what gave you the impression MS had no advertisements...

@danie10 I covered that in my original message, qoto has no ads, other instances prohibit it as well. But many instances do have adds including Mastodon.social (MS) in their local timeline. Worse yet even if your local instance doesnt have any that means the federated feed will have a few at a minimum.

@danie10 For that I will need to check. I know they their policy is not to ban commercial accounts. Or are you saying that their polciy is to ban commercial accounts that sign up?

@danie10 I never claimed they could pay to get adverts inserted into your home feed. Why should they have to, they get to insert it for free into both your local and federated feed.

I'm not sure its much better knowing they dont get charged to be able to insert their ads into your feeds.

@danie10 Well yea but to me that is better.

Either way twitter or mastodon you're getting ads, so damage to you is done either way

In the case of twitter and FB though there are two advantages

1) it is tagged explicitly as an ad, this makes it trivial for ad blockers to remove it from your your timeline. So its in the power to easily remove it from the user, mastodon ads there is no easy way to eliminate them entierly.

2) What money is made on ads goes partly to the platform. So at least instead of all that money being in the pockets of the people advertising it actually goes to improbe the platform, and therefore benefitting us, the users, if that money is spent well.