so I was looking at someone’s personal website from Mastodon, and noticed that they had banners to advertise other people’s servers. while server lists like fediring exist, I was thinking of a more automatic method of advertisement within someone’s website.

the concept is this: people could store advertisements (small banners, gifs) on their websites with a server and people willing to embed them could use an API to retrieve a random ad onto their website.

people would self-host their ads and “federate” with other websites to embed other ads on their website. not sure if this would scale up as well, though.

what do you think? just curious on lemmy’s POV

edit: going by the comments, this idea is quite flawed and webrings (in small sizes) are a better approach.

thanks for the help

  • umami_wasabiEnglish
    2•1 year ago

    There are numerous problems other:

    • content governance
    • format standardization
    • malvertisement prevention
    • XSS possibility
    • Loading time to different advertiser’s server (subject to implementation)
    • Revenue (if monetary based, which may involve going down the cryptocurrency, tracking/privacy, ad fruad, etc. rabbit hole)
    • Ad blockers

    That’s what I think of off of my head.

    • @zolax@programming.devOPEnglish
      1•1 year ago
      1. people would choose individual websites (likely their friends) to host ads of, although list making would be problematic
      2. ideally would just serve images or gifs with as simple an API as possible
      3. similar idea to point 1 but abuse of such a system would be an issue (eg. a website is hacked and changed to inappropriate ads). one of the concept’s main implications
      4. similar idea to point 2: videos could also be problematic though
      5. potentially some form of client-side (website) caching? this whole thing is just an idea, so I really don’t know how it work
      6. no revenue - and therefore breaches of privacy and tracking would be unlikely - as the servers would be individually hosted, and therefore decentralised. however, this approach would make it significantly easier for malicious parties to pay users for ads.
      • as to whether or not that happens would be the user’s decision, although (at least right now) such advertising sounds more costly and hard to enforce.
      1. you’re right that ad-blockers could (although probably not at first) be used to block ads, as the ads would be for other personal websites (no real ad protection needed as per point 6), some could unblock them knowing that they would be more ethical (again, just a concept). this would be a problem though as most visitors would have an ad-blocker regardless.

      thanks for the points