@wendyhk@mastodon.green Old guy here. I was on the internet when it was till mainly Gopher and there was a new thing called HyperText or the World Wide Web. I have seen how everything turned to giant sewage pipes when commerce came in. The newsgroups that were meant for job opportunities, for example, were very useful at first. But when commerce came in, it became real hard to find the real job openings in the flood of fake job openings posted by recruiters (to show how big they were). I think The fediverse already has more than enough possibilities for companies. If your local baker wants to post the discounts of the day, I am sure that company will get some local followers who find that information useful. In fact, I became customer of a few companies after seeing their messages on Mastodon. One of them is an investigative journalism organization. I'd say that companies who behave well already do have a place here. The same applies to governments and governmental organizations. The point is: companies have deep pockets and are therefore by definition more powerful than the normal people on the web. We do not need more monetizing possibilities, we need more control over what is forced down our throats. This is off course what Mastodon is good at, but the fediverse is not immune to trolling and flood attacks that killed the early internet. The fact that we can mute and/or block accounts should force companies to behave, but there is no guarantee. Remember: the early internet was built by the US military (who invented it), and the sites were built by educational institutions and normal people. Note that the word "money" lacks completely in this sentence. People did get paid to put their websites on-line, nor did they expect to. Veronica (the search engine) found what you were looking for and nobody could pay for a higher ranking in the search results. Then commerce took over and turned the internet into the biotoxic stalking "influencing" surveying pile of excrement that still has some rare well-behaving sites if you know where to look and how to block the crap.Not because all commerce is bad, but because it was too easy for bad commerce to dominate the rest. BlackSky seems to be experimenting with commercial possibilities. I surely hope that that does kill it.