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