Surely you mean <ul>…<ol>…</ol></ul>

It’s entirely possible, I agree, but as of right now, there’s only really two ways to show a person ads - targeted or not targeted. And that applies to all forms of advertising really, not just online. I don’t know enough about marketing to say how long it might take to develop zero knowledge ads but in terms of funding development and hosting we’re very long way away from that being a possibility.

And the ethos of the Fediverse was, in part, formed around the idea of not being served ads that were either utterly irrelevant and thus irritating or scarily relevant and thus unsettling. The Fediverse is pretty closely aligned with open source and privacy philosophy. I think any instance that runs ads is going to see either no revenue as they’ll be adblocked or the instance will see a sharp drop off in users.

The issue with your first point is that in order to be served ads you actually want to see, the provider (instance admin) needs to know what you like and that way leads to tracking scripts.

Sure, it’d be easy to do that but that’s true for everything with an open API really. I don’t think that makes Lemmy less privacy respecting. The only thing a harvester could grab is the things you’ve chosen to post publicly. Is that a good thing? No, not really but it’s certainly much less invasive than being on a site/app that harvests both that and fingerprints your devices and tries to get all your OS/location data/etc at the same time.

If we look at how things went for Mastodon during the various twitter exodus waves, it’s a very similar pattern - huge increase followed by tail off, then another wave of increase followed by another tail off etc. I suspect the same thing will happen with Lemmy/Reddit. We all know reddit are going to continue to do stupid things prior to their IPO so it’s likely there’ll be more waves of influx followed by tail offs.

This is actually good as it’s organic growth/loss. I can’t think of an example where a big push by a company to get more users has resulted in a ‘better’ community, just a larger one. Organic growth/loss is much more likely to result in a better community as oppose to just a ‘popular’ one. Or, to put it another way, lets aim for quality not quantity.

Now that my instance has defeded from Hexbear I don’t see much outright tankie stuff anymore and on the very rare occasions I do come across it, I just block the user. That said, I have noticed a growing trend of people calling anything slightly to the political left of Joe Biden either socialist, communist or tankie as though those terms were interchangeable, which they’re not. Either way, if it bothers you, either ignore it, block the user, block the community or move your account to an instance that is defeded from the instances you are upset by.

Let’s also not forget Lemmy is not mature software and has only become as heavily used as it is now about 3 months ago. There’s a lot of features missing, particularly for admin and mod users, so we can either be patient and do what we can right now, fork Lemmy, create unofficial patches or not use it.

I do feel like we’ve become so used to highly polished, corporate solutions that do everything that we’ve lost our ability to be patient. For me, its vastly preferable to be somewhere where I’m not tracked, fingerprinted, advertised to and have my data sold but at the same time put up with a few idiosyncrasy’s of the software than the alternative.

It’s not necessarily privacy focused but it’s certainly much more privacy respecting than reddit, or any other mainstream social media company. The codebase doesn’t try and fingerprint you, the various apps don’t either so no shadow profile of you or your behaviour is being built or sold on to 3rd parties. The only info that’s stored about you (aside from IP address for mod purposes which is meaningless if you use a VPN) is what you volunteer to your instance and what you post publicly.

How on Earth do you get the idea that expressing distaste for mainstream social media methods is saying ‘the fediverse isn’t for the masses’?

Sometimes, after a period of time dealing with the day to day realities resulting from political issues, people just want to be somewhere where they don’t have to keep having to experience those issues, even in text form. Everyone needs a break for awhile and saying so is not an act of transphobia or any other kind of intolerance, its just an acknowledgment that everyone has a limit and needs to be aware of how stretching that limit can effect mental health.

“Lemmy’s largest server, Lemmy.world has defederated from a large server that is dedicated to piracy, citing regulatory reasons…”

No it hasn’t.

OP, I don’t know if you’re the person who maintains this site or not but this is not accurate. .world has blocked 2 communities on dbzer0 and 1 on .ml, no defederation has taken place. Whoever wrote that article needs to rewrite a lot of it.

Closest is probably Alexandrite with the Cards layout selected.