this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2025
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Yes. I perhaps should have stated the other way round.
What about "ethical" social network. That's free and ad based if you want that. And the ads are present but less manipulative because the goal is to cover costs not maximise profit.
And then that's a premium option if you want to have no ads and full control of your content feed.
The reason Facebook and co don't offer this is because they apparently make massive amounts from each user ($68). And that only because they engage in whatever ghoulish behaviour get people locked in enough to deliver that
An ethical social network wouldn't have to drive as much per user, because it would publicly limit itself to modest profit. Covering free use with ads presumably possible. Cost of premium being running cost + modest profit seems like it wouldn't be that high surely?
There is a completely free, add-less social network: Mastodon. But for some obscure reason, "nobody" wants to use it. Instead, everyone is moving to BlueSky.
I don't think costs are the reason for people not using certain social networks. Simplicity and ease-of-use is. And federated networks suffer hard from this, because simply explaining the way they work is too much for people. They want to read and post stuff, and not think about which server to pick so that they can get the biggest audience.
theoretically, sure it's possible. but in practice, capitalism will win out in the end. this is pretty much what happened to reddit. first unobtrusive non-targeted ads, then reddit gold... you know the rest.
I think capitalist ghoulishness dominates innovation at the moment. Because massive resources will always be ahead doing new things. But at some point - I hope - a fairly agreeable social network becomes a sort of 'solved problem'. Perhaps some FOSS version becomes available that's not cutting edge but gets the job done. It would lack the sophisticated needed to coerce people and milk their attention, but that's not needed for our purposes.
The appeal in popular social networks isn't innovation, it's the sheer quantity of other users. You don't need resources just to do new things, you need resources to build and maintain the infrastructure to serve all those users. That's why FOSS social media will always be niche like Lemmy and mastodon.