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

@freemo not sure what ads you are talking about? There is no ad selling and each instance is individually owned and run and survives on dinations.

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

@freemo Mastrodon is not MS? What MS are you talking about as I'm bit lost now? I've been using two different instances of Mastodon and not seen any ads.

@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.

@freemo I'm on Mastodon.social and rechecked the feed by scrolling down - I don't see any ads. I'm only seeing those who I follow and their boosts. What ads are you seeing - maybe I can do a search and see if I see them that way?

@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?

@freemo yes please look. Anyone is free to sign up with an account on Mastodon including commercial companies. It's up to us to decide if we want to follow them or not. But what they can't do is to pay for adverts to be inserted into our Home feeds. They can post about their business but I would only see that on the public feed, and not on my feed (unlike Twitter or Facebook who inserts those adverts into your feed even if you are not following the account). So my Home feed is clean and just shows the accounts I'm following.

@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.

@freemo Yes I was referring to paid ads that get inserted into feeds by Twitter and Facebook - Mastodon does not do that.

I think we are saying the same thing differently about the Local and Federated feeds - a commercial account can post just like a private account whatever they want to. I see that as a post, and you are probably referring to those posts as ads as they come from a commercial entity.

What they can't do is insert their posts into your Home feed unless you follow them. This is the difference between Facebook/Twitter and Mastodon.

@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.

@freemo I'm on Fosstodon for over a year haven't seen an (official) ad yet. I did see some rogue spammers but the admins of my instance make short work of that. I took a look at your instance (qoto.org) public stream and frankly it's a mess. I wouldn't stay there for a minute. Choose your instance wisely (e.g read the CoC and check the local timeline) then stay on your local timeline and your good.

What I've seen on FB, YouTube and Linkedin is a bombardment of profiled! ads and it's getting worse. Mastodon is nothing like that unless you admin can't be trusted. So again choose your instance wisely.

If in the end you decide that FB and Twitter are better for you there is no reason to stay on Mastodon of course.

@danie10

@ericbuijs1

Well I never said there were "official" ads, only ads.

With that said i dont know what rules fosstodon has, I only mentioned MS as I know their rules. Perhaps they dont allow commercial accounts.

QOTO also bans commercial accounts so some instances are ad free, but MS is not as far as i know.

@danie10

@ericbuijs1

By the way I never said FB and twitter are better for me. I run my own instance so I invest the time in blocking commercial accounts instance wide. So I'm more than happy here. Just saying there are plenty of ads in the network and they are much harder to block is all.

@danie10

@freemo You instance, in that case you might want to take a look at @arxiv_math@qoto.org who posted dozens toots with links to his/her own website on your instance in a matter of minutes.

@danie10

@ericbuijs1

Which of these posts were commercial in nature? All I see are free-to-the-pubic journal papers, nothing commercial.

@danie10

@freemo I never said it was an ad. I was merely pointing towards a user that is spamming your instance. I was trying to do you a favour because I found it most annoying when I checked the instance. Anyway if you're fine with it that's OK with me, it's your instance after all. I wish you the best of luck with Qoto instance.

@ericbuijs1 They arent spamming the instance, they dont tag anyone, follow anyone, and are marked as a bot.

There is nothing about that bot that would constitute spam. Making a handful of posts over a short period once a day is hardly spam by any measure.

I do appreciate you mentioning it, but any user can filter out bots if they dont want to see automated posts. So its a non-problem as far as I can see.

Thank you.