There’s distinction between targeted ads and community ads.

Mainstream internet is bad for targeted ads and for-profit site that plaster ads as maximum as possible.

Fediverse instance like Misskey.io runs ads, but all of them community ads. Letting their community promote their indie games, manga serialization, artbook release, online event gathering, etc.

Among every server that “do just fine,” there are more instances that are just gone for not having proper funding, especially for non-Western instance where paying for social media in not a common thing. I’m from Indonesian, and almost every Indonesian instance are cease to exist except for Misskey.id.

While Mastodon does not support ads, other fediverse software like Misskey support it. Misskey.io, the second biggest fedi instance after Mastodon.social, runs ads and subscription simutaniously.

Their ads is merely community ads. Letting their community promote their indie games, manga serialization, artbook release, online event gathering, etc. I think that might be replicatable for Western instance like Mastodon.art or Pixelfed.art.

The notion that Mastodon (and/or) Twitter as public conversation is not universal.

There’s a lot of people, especially in other language that use the social media as microblog or casual coversation. I’m Indonesian, and a lot of people here using Twitter as “anon” account for random rambling (basically microblog) without even interacting with anyone (except IRL friend).

Even Mastodon (and other fedi software) has feature for followers only post or quiet posting (cannot be viewed in live feed, or discovery).

Mastodon users don’t wanna be searchable

Debatable. People don’t want their private account searchable. Creators and news account want their account and their post to be discoverable.

The subscription model rarely works.

It’s not that the subscription model doesn’t work. It’s the investor that demands things to grow even more all the time. There are plenty of service that simply deliver good stuff without investor demand and ended being sustainable for years.

Fedi becomes more accepting of ads

At least, some non-Western fediverse instance runs ads. Notably the second biggest instance in fediverse, Misskey.io. Their ads are community ads, like promoting indie games, vtuber, comic books, IRL gallery event, etc. They also did subscription providing additional cosmetics like Discord. Everyone’s happy.

Yep. SteamOS has Flathub, which is a software repository (like software store) that has so many alternative of Windows software.

That “dumb” name is just name in another language 🫠