Traditional advertising has worked perfectly fine for centuries. In the last 10 years technology has advanced to the point where dragnet surveillance is cheap, and suddenly all the advertisers are chomping at the bit to overpay for "targeted" advertising. Most ads are still only sold based on geographic region, and "demographic data" is proving to be completely useless. Your average social media user will see ads that are completely unrelated to their actual interests.

At best, maybe a "targeted" ad is worth twice as much as a normal ad, but is that worth the hundreds of billions of dollars spent developing that technology, and the loss of privacy for billions of people?

However, when your platform is for everyone, does everything, hosts any kind of content, you have nothing to use.

Why can't you use the content of the page to decide what ads to show? If there's a Reddit thread discussing games, show gaming ads in that thread and kitchen ads in the threads about cooking. If your front page on Twitter happens to have multiple people writing about traveling, show travel ads. You don't need to know anything about the users to advertise based on content.

Yes, I know there's always been some sort of targeting in ads, but in the past it was mostly generic targeting, and you were targeted as part of a group, not individually. The thing is: I guess people would be ok if some generic data is collected (like general interests -as long as you can manage it-, and in the case of personal information, your birth year, at most). But I personally am not ok with them reading everything I write (including private conversations), check every interaction, even analyzing pictures content with AI, or buying information from other sources and cross-checking it, for example. It's extremely invasive. They've been too greedy with acquiring information, and some people are reacting negatively to it.

I also completely dislike algorithmic content. I don't need the platform guessing what I like to try to keep me in there by offering me content I didn't ask for. I'm absolutely ok with a timeline, and just looking at the content from people I follow (I even don't like re-posted content, but I think I'm in the minority there). I don't need Social Media to "entertain me" in any capacity. So, that's another factor to leave these sites. They're constantly trying to hook you, lure you into spending time on their sites. No, thank you, but no.

My FB account was also closed a long time ago. They had too much information about me, and clearly showed they couldn't be trusted. Instagram, in my case, was less personal, but still, AI has advanced a lot, and they can now probably understand what's in the pictures people upload. So, it's time to leave that too. I also closed my Reddit account. And My Twitter account is just a placeholder without info. Right now, I'm just using Mastodon, Lemmy and Pixelfed. I won't go back to corporate social media.

Absolutely. I’ll go the same route. I’ll put a message informing of my departure for my contacts for a while, and urging people to switch to Mastodon, and then close my personal account on Instagram (I closed my Facebook account a long time ago). I encouraged my son to download Mastodon too, and tell his friends to do the same. I hope they end up switching with time.

I have an account for some projects (business account) that I don’t care if it’s being tracked, as I put no personal information there. I’ll keep that as long as it’s useful. But I hope I can close it eventually, if people switch to Mastodon. We’ll see.

Those are good questions. I definitely think people should be paid for their labor and that companies should be paid for their goods and services. In most situations, I even think that they should be able to freely set their own prices, and sell ads.

However, I do not think that they should be able to use someone's personal data unless they freely consent to it, or it is a direct consequence of the type of service they are providing. Selling ad space to a third party does not count.

The other exception to this philosophy are monopolies. Monopolies have exceptional power to abuse their consumers and should have limits on their ability to price gouge, among other things. Facebook and Instagram are monopolies, and there is no alternative to the platform that they control. There are plenty of competitors, but even if a competitor like Friendica or PixelFed can out-compete Meta on features, price, and quality, it is impossible for them to compete when it comes to having a platform with 1 billion locked-in users. This applies on both a local level, a persons' friends may only be active users of Facebook, and nothing else; As well on a national level, Platforms like Mastodon have to fight an uphill battle when Meta can leverage their user base to make Threads leapfrog Mastodon.

It does not cost Meta €10-€15 a user to run FB or Instagram. Nor do they even make that much in revenue from ads, personalized or otherwise. It's pure, monopolistic, price gouging to look good to the regulators.

I pay $20/month to support Lemmy's development. I would honestly be happy to pay the same to Pixelfed. As it is right now, I will probably pay the €25 that Meta will gouge me for to preserve my privacy rights across my various Meta accounts. I have no other choice, 80% of my social life would vanish if I lost all the connections and event feeds that I have manually added to FB and Instagram.

Fair enough.

Shit thing for me, I use it to reach guests and make announcements for the restaurant. Sucks but that's where most people still get local information.

Instagram doesn’t let you continue unless you choose one of the options.