When they talk about decentralization, they speak about removing control over personal data and removing ads.

But this is not decentralization. This social network will still not be able to function without a central server, will it?. Or am I missing something here?

You cannot call something decentralized if you just remove ads from it.

Hello! Your rating was updated! https://icoholder.com/en/sphere-social-17799

I would say that after completing the ico they would need even more advertising and marketing to attract more customers

Yes they will need both. Marketing is critically important because the environment where they are operating in has a few competitors and even if they a very good product, an inferior product could overtake them due to the impact of marketing

Normally, if a project has a large community it is a guarantee of success since it already has a large number of users, who use the platform and who are likely to told about it to their nearby people.

Hello everybody,
Where can I find the ICO status/results? (Token sold out, ETH raised...)
Thanks

when a social media gets decentralized, does that automatically mean that nobody has control over content which means no one will be censored?

I think we discussed the team topic a few pages earlier. There are not on the front page of the ANN thread