Lol, never seen someone justify ads as such, gave me a chuckle

Just to add my thoughts to your Facebook point:

I don’t use Facebook much but I do have an account for the sake of keeping connected to distant family I’d otherwise never speak to again. The rare occasion I’m directly contacted and open the app to see what’s up, legitimately every other post, sometimes several in a row, is some kind of ad or sponsernd Post. Legitimately my entire timeline is one massive ad reel, I cannot fathom how people keep using the platform. Literally anything else would be better

This is exactly why I came to Lemmy one. After browsing around and seeing the bigger instances getting absolutely wrecked by refugees, I found Lemmy one, saw it had next to no communities but a reasonable user count, not tiny but not huge. Realized that would probably be the sweet spot for myself, and would support the idea of load balancing the Lemmy instances, instead of everyone flocking to Lemmy ml and beehaw.

Glad to be here, seems like a reasonable instance with an admin who has their head on straight