I left a couple of months ago. Couldn’t be happier.
The writing is on the wall. The leader thinks the Genius-with-hair-transplants is a superstar, despite destroying a globally recognised brand. Inspired by this, Spez is trying to get Reddit ready for an IPO. This means, maximise profits by any means.
Or - as many of us hope for - we manage to make the economics of the fediverse work (don’t forget to support your instances, people) and the most valuable users move to blissful ad-free places like Lemmy and Mastodon.
Indeed, throw in open-source AI (thanks, weirdly, to Zuckerberg) and Wikipedia and you can start to see the contours of a post-advertising internet.
A problem I see is scalability. For example on Lemmy once an instances hits a high enough user count the costs far outweigh donations and moderation becomes a full time job. It’s ad-free for now but costs are going to keep increasing as the demand for storage and constant moderation increase with the userbase.
