• gabe [he/him]
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    122 years ago

    If that is true in any way whatsoever, that is a completely moronic long term goal. Lemmy devs themselves have encouraged instances who do such a thing to defederate. I don’t see how realistically advertising or monetization would be done not only without immense privacy concerns that would likely affect the rest of the fediverse but without major protests and mass defederation. The backlash against it would be immense, not just on lemmy but across the fediverse itself.

    • possibly a cat
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      2 years ago

      Someone is going to at some point. Whoever it is might do it behind-the-scenes if they are risk-averse.

      Think of what the granular user data is worth on an instance that big.

      Want to buy user data? If reddit tells you no that’s that, but in the fediverse you can go and ask the next largest instance if the first one says no. The game theory is a little more complex here in the fediverse.

      When it does happen, I hope the backlash will be appropriately large. I don’t think any of the key stakeholders here want to see a normalization of lemmy being monetized in this way - through donations sure, but not by selling the users’ attention and privacy to 3rd parties.

      • gabe [he/him]
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        62 years ago

        Those that even remotely consider scraping data on Mastodon consistently face intense harassment and criticism.