I didn't follow anybody around. And profile stalking is not necessary when he posted that tripe in the Canada community which is part of my default subscribed list.

You can be happy that trolls are finding Lemmy. I don't have to agree with you.

You may have fundamentally missed how the fediverse works.

Lemmy isn't one big site, it's a collection of independent federated servers that share content, with users able to interact across the network regardless of what server hosts their account.

The servers are funded by their owners/users, and can run themselves however they like.

One server going down or going bad would be a loss, but the network as a whole doesn't depend on any one server/server owner.

Unless you host your account on an instance or use an app that advertises, the only ads you'll see on Lemmy are spambots. And if you do see ads because of the first two reasons, you can simply switch your instance/app. (I recommend Thunder for the latter)

Lemmy is open source, it doesn't have an "owner" that could unconditionally inject advertising into any part of how it works.

The hope is that instead of having to ditch the whole thing when it goes bad, going forward, we can ditch only the parts that go bad, and thereby keep the good going instead of having to set up a whole new thing.

Oh no, the Fediverse runs a bit differently since there are dozens of servers running independently, all sharing information across the network. I don't think advertisers could exert any sort of rules beyond the instances that get paid. That said, the overwhelming majority of instances seem to run on donations.

That's unlikely to happen. The fediverse is supposed to be non-commercial, it's entirely run by volunteers and donations like the old internet. If an admin ever tries to squeeze money out of their users, they can all just move to a different instance and defederate the bad one.

Don't take downvotes close to your heart, I don't think it's appropriate to expect you to have vast knowledge about the site you've just stumbled upon.

But indeed, the model Lemmy runs on is a lot different, and even if some parts will decide to run ads (which I hope they will not), this will be an issue that can be solved on the instance you have an account on.

Have you seen any adds yet? 🙂

'*Apps may add adds I guess

The fediverse was made so no one person or group could completely control it

There are no advertisers here. Any ads you see are app specific, not part of the website.