As long as the ads don’t federate in an un-blockable way, they can do as they like. I wouldn’t make an account there, I’d rather donate actual money than have a degraded experience (which for sure works out better for everyone), but I get the drive to monetize.

And they should absolutely -not- be allowed to federate ads, for any reason, since it goes against the vibe. But inevitably there will be “sponsored posts” (probably already are), and I think those instances/users will see themselves fade to oblivion, as long as new users are brought to understand that they could just chip in $2 and never see an ad.

I use Boost and it has ads. But they're ignorable as a banner here and there, not constantly. I can live with that.

I usually have a private vpn. It’s just isn’t always up. And I can’t be bothered to have it maintained most times because I’m not in control.

I’m considering setting it up through my router which has a built in option, so I don’t have to rely on my third party, but honestly I almost never leave pihole protected networks. So not a priority.

Even if they were correct, the maner of their interactions makes them wrong, especially the hostility.

Also, being a liberal in America is somewhat similar to being a conservative in Europe, I am told - i.e., "leftist" is a term relative to one's local surrounding environment. Maybe one day I will become more leftist, although ironically all the leftist comments here are making me start to lean the opposite direction (it would be different if someone explained the positions, rather than simply dunked on everyone who does not share them - groupthink is not a valid way to arrive at Truth, especially when applied in the format of bullying behaviors to outsiders rather than merely acceptance of the in-crowd).

I have stopped recommending Lemmy to people, bc I would be embarrassed for a new user to come here, get bullied as I have been (far more than happened on Reddit), and blame me like "you recommended me to talk to that crowd!?"). Kbin.social was different bc those communities were blocked from the start - at an instance level even - though that server has been down for days, and now I see it's back up and full of advertisement posts as usual, bc many mods abandoned their communities due to all the technical problems with the service.

But there is hope for change in the future, in terms of perhaps making getting dunked on an opt-in rather than as it currently is an opt-out feature delivered to members of the Fediverse with little to no warning. e.g. here is a discussion I had with an instance admin. Progress, since so many of us joined the Fediverse since the Rexodus, has been (understandably) slow, but can happen, if we work at it!