this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2024
527 points (98.3% liked)
Technology
59347 readers
5301 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Might be a stupid question, but can't threads just post ads as "posts" via activityPub? On mastodon they would appear as toots?
Was just remembering how reddit introduced ads as basically promoted posts and recall facebook doing the same.
I sure fucking hope not.
Ads in Instagram are posts in the timeline from accounts you haven't followed. Ads don't show when you visit a profile and browse its images. So for example a post by Coca-Cola might appear in the main feed even though I never followed it but it has a little "sponsored" marker in a corner to indicate that it's there because Coke paid for it and the ad placement algorithm thinks that I might be interested in that product. As Threads is a spin-off from Instagram, ads there will surely follow the very same model. Sure, you might be able to follow Coca-Cola's Threads account from Mastodon and see the post promoting their drink that way but Threads just cannot place targeted ads on Mastodon because they don't control that feed.
Thanks for the explanation. Makes sense for targeted ads for sure. Still a bit worried about hashtags being used for ads since I follow a lot of hashtags on mastodon and usually have a quite a nice "organic" feed compared to other social media.
Coca-Cola could have an official profile on mastodon.social and use hashtags there as well. Whether corporations use hashtags or not in their "regular" Mastodon posts has nothing to do with Threads.
Also Mastodon has user-level features to restrict unwanted content to show up in your feed ranging from hiding boosts up to blocking the entire instance:
And since Lemmy cannot interact with Threads content at all, defederating Lemmy instances from Threads makes even less sense. One of the big Lemmy instances blocks Threads but doesn't block CSAM instances. Insane priorities their admins have.
Appreciate the thorough explanations, thanks!
The last part is fucked up, yikes...