@evan No, but it is my (naive, perhaps) hope that commercial activity utilizing the Fediverse does so while attempting to further the social goals many of us here share.

E.g., not scraping all public posts and selling them to advertisers.

@evan No, but the HOA doesn't like it. And if you don't genuinely engage with [prospective or current] customers, you're going to have a bad marketing experience.

@evan
✅ With genuine community engagement, absolutely okay. Many small artists rely on Mastodon to pay rent.
⚠️ Bot cross-posting without any genuine community engagement should be questioned.
❌ Spamming - whether that's post spam, follow spam, or hashtag spam should be forbidden.

@evan
Without the ability to rig the algorithm or make deals with a centralized control, *abusive* commercial activity will tend to get blocked.

The most successful strategies are polite, individual creator focused commercial content.

@evan I'd be delighted to see more businesses with accounts on the Fediverse.

Commercial entities can operate on the #Fediverse, provided everyone is free to completely mute them and defederate from them.

But: it's highly unlikely I'll be interested enough to follow any account operating transactionally with its audience, or in a marketing capacity, or fake engagement, etc. So, if there's a significant number like me, commercial activity will have a much more difficult time on the Fediverse than on centralised platforms; and IMO that's as it should be.

@evan

@evan Surely rules likes this should exist at the instance level, not for the fediverse as a whole. If you run an instance and don't want commercial accounts, go ahead and ban them. Defederate from instances that don't share your view, if you feel like it. But that's your instance, not mine.

@evan

no, but without lock-in, it becomes hard to push anything on anybody. which is what I fundamentally love about it. we choose (collectively to a degree) what we see. one of the biggest problems with capitalism (and campaign finance) is that all our media systems basically let people buy our attention. end that and markets and culture get a lot better.

@evan no, but I'd rather have it here on a level playing field for advertisers vs everyone else. User and server bans fine. Posts with promo content fine, for anyone who wants to follow or not-block the poster.

This is not how online advertising works in other places...the advertiser and their big tech partners have huge powers to jam their ads into everything, while doing vile data collection and distribution.

@evan no but a lot of people won't like it, depending on the kind of activity, and the fediverse is, well, diverse and almost nothing is forbidden in it's entirety.