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

  • V H@lemmy.stad.socialEnglish
    11·
    1 year 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.devOPEnglish
      3·
      1 year 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

    • UraniumBlazer@lemm.eeEnglish
      5·
      1 year ago

      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?

    • zolax@programming.devOPEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      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)>

    • zolax@programming.devOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      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)

  • moonpiedumplings@programming.devEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    Somewhat related, there is a site I follow called royalroad. Royalroad is a site for web serials, which are basically books uploaded to the internet chapter by chapter.

    Although royalroad used to be only google ads, at some point they started accepting user submitted ads. (Also, ads on that site have always been unobtrusive).

    I like these ads much better because they are more privacy respecting (literally an a image and a link).

    Also, they are really funny. User’s with no art skills will make memes, or doodle stick figures, and I clicked on that one anyways, and the story was soooo good.

    • zolax@programming.devOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      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

  • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    For blogs there are also ping-backs, which serve a similar function, i.e. if a blog-post is mentioned on another blogging site the original page is automatically notified via the comment section of the blog-post in question.