The issue is that without marketing or any big scale advertising, the fediverse is never going to take off. Because it is not backed by a big corporation with enough capital like Reddit, it won't ever reach the masses, even with all the advertising the recent Reddit API changes have brought to lemmy and the fediverse, even if Fedi were to be 10x better than anything else.
@retreat3926@Bicyclejohn If that really is the case, then there needs to be a happy medium between intrusive ads that uglify a UI and spammy nonsense that plagues corporate social media. But even then, a lot of people came here to get away from corpo spam, and will not take kindly or lightly to ads suddenly appearing on their feeds (and some instances have and will outright ban it)
Personally, whatever revenue they make up in ads, they should instead ask for it in subscriptions. That would remove the incentive to promote engagement via whatever means necessary (resulting in hatred promotion and false catchy titles, to the detriment of the user), and weed out spammers. Of course, if they do that, user count will plummet. But I really don't like what they are doing now.
Any instance starting to use ads would likely lose a lot of users. We don't want to look at ads, they are everywhere and they are poison.
I could see a small membership fee as being more acceptable, like a dollar per month. It's not a big deal for a lot of people. But we are not there yet.