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

Ads are annoying and can be privacy intrusive depending upon the ad network. However, do u have a better funding model in mind to keep these open sourced alternatives up and running?

Donation based models don't rlly work that well. Restricting stuff behind a paywall is an option, but ethically a little icky one. Ads are the best in these cases, right?

I'll just copy a previous reply:

the ads would ideally be limited to banners and gifs in the same style as these, with each user choosing whose ads they wish to host

no revenue or popularity (these are only for personal websites) would (hopefully) prevent users from hosting invasive ads. quite a few personal websites have banners linking to others, so this would be a more simpler approach

(although in principle, a whole project dedicated to automate this doesn’t sound good)>

I like ads as long as they aren't super personalized and advertising companies didn't track my every move I made to deliver it to me.

Plus if admins directly hosted ads they'd get 100% of the revenue, massive advertising companies routinely scalp the revenue and only give pennies to admins that host them.

the ads would ideally be limited to banners and gifs in the same style as these, with each user choosing whose ads they wish to host

no revenue or popularity (these are only for personal websites) would (hopefully) prevent users from hosting invasive ads. quite a few personal websites have banners linking to others, so this would be a more simpler approach

(although in principle, a whole project dedicated to automate this doesn't sound good)

these simple type of ads used in the early internet was exactly the idea I was going for, having little involved to breach privacy or be used as an attack vector. more individual user ads was also what I was imagining, and looking at them, they are quite funny too

I'll try explain the idea more concisely:

• user wants to promote own website
• user creates ads (small banners and gifs) like these and hosts them on an instance of the software through their website
  • the server-side implementation would have an API to fetch the URL of the advertisements from to embed to the website (just simple image files or gifs)
• user asks other people (friends, others in the fediverse) to save their website on these peoples' own lists of websites that they are willing to host the ads for
  • people would host based off of similar content, interesting topics, and general goodwill as opposed to exposure (as very few personal websites get constant exposure to large audiences) and revenue (as this would be a willing move)
• the client-side implementation of those hosting other websites' ads would randomly pick a URL from the user's own list (similar to picking a random URL from a webring), use the API (something like /get_ad?) to retrieve the URL of a random ad from the promoting user and display that on their website
• "automatic" was a bad word choice, I'll change it now
• this wouldn't solve a problem, just automate the functions of webrings by giving every user their own decentralised "webring" (the list of websites) and displaying user-curated ads (probably at the bottom of the page where most banners are) as opposed to randomly picking from a webring
• those using personal websites would be the users, while visitors would be the audience.

should've made the wording more clearer in the post, my bad I guess. and to clarify, this is just an concept I thought about though and I don't actually have plans to develop this. (I've also edited the post with my final opinion on the subject.)

yeah, that sounds like a similar idea.

has anyone implemented this in a decentralised manner?

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.

7. 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