This is the second advertising post I’ve seen on lemmy and they were both today. I’m wondering how other people feel about it or if they’ve even seen posts like this?
Personally I’m livid and hate seeing it here. One of the things that attracts me to lemmy is the donation based, volunteer run, distributed, open access nature of it. I don’t want it to become profit driven and I really don’t want to see companies in what I belive should be a purely social endeavour. I really think making it profit driven will ruin it, if that means it stays smaller then I’m okay with that.
Now I know I can block them and move on which is what I’ve done. I’m also pleased to say that both posts I saw were heavily downvoted and I did my part too.
I’m curious if other people agree with me and don’t want advertising like this on lemmy? Also, what do people think we can actually do about it if we don’t want it around? Petition instance admins to ban advertising accounts? Then how do we define one? Can anything actually be done or do I just have to block and move on from a possibly ever increasing flow of advertising until I get bored and move on?
Sorry for the long rambling post and thanks if you read this far.
Companies will company, if there’s an open door to spam things they will. SPAM in the email realm I recall seeing a stat that it accounts for somewhere around 90%+ of email traffic, so thus all the crazy hurdles of ip lists, dkim, spf, etc.
I’ve seen accounts created on Mastodon for just that purpose. They get a warning that such is not the platform’s purpose, if ignored into the ban bucket they go. The problem is it’s easy to create accounts unless the admins want to manually review and approve every applicant. External IP blocks work to an extent, but are always going to be reactive in nature getting banned after they’ve been reported. Ce’st la’vie (or however it’s spelled)
If there’s a plus side to it, their presence here means that someone thinks the network reach is enough to be worth the effort to post something here to get some kind of return.
This is kind of how I thought it might be. Due to the way it all works I don’t think we can really do much about it and will just have to adjust I guess.