lemmy.ml is down right now. You’re going to have to wait until it’s back up to ask them - this question/answer is just local to lemm.ee until it comes back up and can appropriately federate.

How do you think Meta and other similar companies attract advertisers? They sell ad space to them with the ability to highly target ads to their users.

That’s what I mean by sell - they are literally letting advertisers buy ads to target to all of the people who they’ve gotten information about that would most likely click on and convert to buyers. Non-targeted ads are significantly less valuable from an advertising standpoint because if they don’t apply to you, you’re more likely to ignore it and the advertiser is getting less money back on their ad purchase investment.

I love how you say ‘almost every app’ and then your three examples include two Meta apps and also Twitter. Their whole business models are to gather as much as possible to sell.

Not every app needs your health data, financial information, and usage data to send short messages to their friends. I get wanting a certain amount of data in order to do certain things but needing basically everything possible frankly SHOULD BE eye opening to people if they didn’t already know.

I mean, did anyone think it wasn’t basically spyware?

Three total, but was using lemmy.world as my main until recently with all the groaning under the pressure of all the new signups so yesterday I spent about an hour or so methodically recreating my subscribe feed on lemm.ee

Nothing at all against the admins over at .world but when it’s pushing the absolute limits of capacity with all the new people coming by, it makes for a different experience all together on a smaller instance. Course because it’s hiccuping over there I’m seeing some significant delays in federation but whaddyagonnado.