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.

Some dude is making a living.

It is blessed that he is trying to find customer for his trade, not trying to scam people.

Eh, I'm not 100% against them. There's a time and a place for ads. If a 3d printer company wants to have an account, post they have a new 3d printer, and it's in a 3d printing company, that's an ad, but I want that one. 3d printing filament manufacturer having a sale on filament? I want that ad bc I wanna get that cheap filament. Random driving service in an unrelated community? Block and move on.

I don't think it'll get too bad because there's no automated ads here. All ads/posts are manual, AFAIK. (I'm sure someone will figure out how to automate it.) If it does get too bad, then there should be something more, sure, but it's not there yet.

It depends. What is the instance's stance on paid promotion? What is the community's stance on self promotion? Is the person pushing the product adding value to the community by doing so?

Personally. I don't think I'd be on an ad funded instance. That's a nope from me. If a community has a flat ban on self promotion, that can be a little crappy sometimes, but I get it. But like... If Ploopy is posting into the trackball community or the 3d printing community or the open source hardware company, I actually think that's great and I want to see more stuff like that. Yes, its advertising, but that's also a company / person who wants to be a helpful contributor to those communities

I guess it's a good sign that the Fediverse is growing! :) -_-;

I like it a lot better than the Reddit ads with locked comments