Advertising networks get away with so much, it's quite ridiculous. The same company that will ban your account for posting about such content, will regularly run ads about such content. Worse, there's nothing you can do about it except run ad blockers (which they in turn will use various measures as punishment for you doing so).
Guess we didn't learn anything from Cambridge Analytica.
I'm trying to get more into self hosting and things like federation that can allow technical people to be admins of low-maintenance services for their friends and family.
It's a slow push but it's gonna happen. Microtransactions are stuck in deployment hell, advertisements are a deal with the devil, and this is the only third option I know of
It's a pure Rust server so it's extremely lightweight to self-host compared to things like Mastodon, plus it supports events (with iCal/Google Calendar export). I'm also happy to host an instance on my DigitalOcean Kubernetes cluster for anyone interested and integrate it into my CI/CD pipeline, which is an option on my GitHub sponsors page (and I'm working on a load balancer which should eventually bring the cost of this down as well).
I appreciate the feedback! While I haven't had plans to ship binaries to platform-specific package managers, I'll certainly consider it. (I do have plans to publish it to Cargo, but have yet to get to that.) PRs for this would be very welcome, as I have no experience shipping things to apt/yum/etc. :)
Agreed, also a lot of room for improvement in this general area. I remember when Mastodon instances used to be a giant pain to get up and going, and now there's one click deploys and even entire businesses who will manage your server.
I don't think widespread self-hosting will ever be easy enough, since anything that makes it easy enough for anyone to do necessarily has as much control over your account as Elon Musk does. Plus it costs a few bucks a month. But what might be possible is widespread co-op-hosting - run one for your whole family or friend group.
I'm surprised that cops haven't started arresting people for receiving ads about contraband, which would imply (to a cop brain) that they must be creating the demand for such items.
There are loopholes in the US currently for drug advertisements. As an example, a very simplistic one so don't take it as legal gospel - while you cannot advertise Ketamine as a pharmaceutical on print or tv you can advertise "direct to consumer" on social media/web as long as your company doesn't specifically pack/distribute the drugs themselves.
Guess we didn't learn anything from Cambridge Analytica.