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[IDEA] self-hosted advertisements for personal sites (programming.dev)
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by zolax@programming.dev to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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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

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[-] vidarh@lemmy.stad.social 12 points 2 years ago

This is basically the concept of a Webring, and used to be big. Some were fixed (as in the path through the ring was always the same), but some were more flexible or random or semi-random.

A decentralised approach would be new, and not necessarily too hard since the dataset for each ring would be small, so each member could just store all or a subset of the entries in their ring and submit updates to their "neighbours" in the ring that'd eventually spread out to everyone. The challenge is moderation - you'll still end up with some entities that have a privileged position to weed out bad entries, because the appeal was always to a large extent to make discovery "someone else's problem" and the moment you let someone put links on your site someone will try to abuse it.

[-] zolax@programming.dev 3 points 2 years ago

you're right that abuse would be the biggest issue, made worse if people host ads for many people. ideally people would naturally host few ads in a similar fashion to smaller instances (ideally) federating with few instances? also didn't realise that so many webrings still exist until I searched them up

this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023
27 points (100.0% liked)

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