Hear me out… I’ve lurked on reddit for 14 years.
At the beginning, many companies were aware of unofficial communities about their products, but didn’t touch reddit with a ten foot pole, but as reddit became more mainstream and some companies started monitoring unofficial reddit communities to provide customer support and interact with the community, some even embraced reddit and declared the subreddits “official”.
I imagine that some of the early reluctance derived from them having to rely on reddit to host their community. (and now we see how much reddit is trustworthy, also at the time reddit was on the “news” only for the worst reasons)
But now they have the chance, given that lemmy and other reddit alternatives have captured some internet buzz, to adhere to Lemmy and spin their own instances and host their communities.
This would help bring more instances into the fediverse by companies who can bill it to their marketing and community budgets.
I would love to see:
We have looped around and we are back to vBulleting and phpBB times. But this time it’s federated.
Such a good idea then it would be easy to avoid them ;)
I mean not all advertising is bad in general, intrusive and annoying advertising is.
If a company (say a company making a new vegetarian food product) makes a post in a community like “hey, we made this new product, here is a code if you want to try it go to our website and you get 30% off from the first order and Price Back Guarantee” that wouldn’t be damaging and a win win in my eyes, they could do very specific advertising and the communities are more likely interested.
It shouldn’t be a daily thing or spamming of course, but its only natural for companys to want their products being seen. And if they misbehave, you can just block them completely, like their entire instance if necessary.