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I'm sure not everyone will agree, but honestly, I kind of stopped caring too much. I've been using Instagram, Google, Android, Apple, and many other service providers for years and none seems to know a lot about me based on the stuff I see being advertised to me.
None of them seem to have figured out what languages I speak (I get a lot of language courses for English and German, but I'm native in both), what my education level is (I get a lot of 'study your bachelor or master here or there or online' despite having two master's degrees), where I really live (lots of British stuff always, but I live out of Europe), or what my hobbies are (lots of mobile games that I wouldn't touch with a stick).
Yeah, it seems they get the basics (I'm male, below 35, I am interested in educational stuff), but that could be anyone... And if I can use their services for tree for them to put me in a category with some 10M others, I'm kinda okay
(I know it's a late response but I only saw this post now and wanted to response to your particular comment) It was also the case for me because I usually didn't consume stuff from my age or from my native language but I still stopped using their services for the most part and deactivated any kind of telemetry from them for the remaining stuff I still use because despite all of that, I still don't want to support their business model or the companies themselves, as well as their constant push to consumerism through ads drowning. So privacy isn't the only reason to stop letting them listen to you I think.
Question is, what business model would you support?
Ads are the thing that pay for a lot of services most people use in daily lives. Imagine you needed a paid subscription for your email, your search engine, browser, social media account(s)...
Lemmy is fun and all, but eventually it will need to expand and pay for server costs and so on. Yes, perhaps it will be carried by enthusiastic community members, but that's just a higher paid subscription for a few rather than many.
I agree fully with you that the level of commercialisation is beyond crazy by now, and many developments do not have the user in mind. But that's not on the business model itself, but the companies' decisions.