this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
1220 points (91.7% liked)
Technology
59232 readers
3468 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I, too, love intrusive tracking permissions and ads.
Oh, wait... no I don't.
Just pay to remove the ads then, this disables all of that
Definitely worth the 20 USD
You want free. You want no ads. You want sustainable. You want a fairy tale.
... They said, on the ad free, FOSS free, free as in beer free, constantly updated and sustained platform.
Posted from my free, ad free, constantly updated, 'fairy tale' Android App.
But actually not free as in free beer. Someone is paying to sustain these instances.
Edit: this is the 2nd time I've seen the phrase "free as in free beer" today and decided to look it up because I hadn't really taken notice of it before. I retract my statement and apologize. You used it perfectly and TIL, so thank you.
Upvoted not because you're right, but because you realized you were wrong and will hopefully inspire others to look up the meanings behind phrases they read on the internet.
I also needed a refresher.
You can't grow if you can't admit to yourself that you're wrong some of the time.
(งツ)ว
Don't get ahead of yourself about sustainability. Let's see how long free ad-free at scale lasts.
~~To be fair, the platform is not free, the instance admins pay for it. Also to be fair my instance currently only costs $7 a month, but that's more than nothing~~.
I hadn't heard free as in beer free before, apologies, I was just being a pedantic ass.
Pedantic Ass is my middle name, so no worries!
I can't hold it against a developer for wanting to be compensated for their time. It's totally fair to want to get paid for your work. But there are already a number of growing apps that support the FOSS ideals of Lemmy so everything I've been seeing with Sync has just left a bad taste in my mouth.
Funded by an Open Source grant by NLNet
Just because you think something is free doesn't mean it is.
Just because something receives funding doesn't mean it isn't free. I understand development has costs. Hosting has costs. But nobody is extorting payment for hosting or developing lemmy. As an end user, the service is free to use. That's obviously what I'm referring to.
Until the grant runs out and new funding needs to be found. And when socialised funding become untenable they will turn to the users or the corporations. Nothing is free.
Asking for donations is, again, different than extortion. There's a stark difference between a splash screen asking for funding to continue providing a free service and forcing ads and tracking in exchange for cash to operate on said FOSS platform.
Who said anything about extortion? We're talking about the service being free, just because you're not the one paying for it doesn't make it free.
Use a different app, nobody's forcing you to use Sync.
Where was that implied at all?
Half my feed is filled with posts about Sync so I decided to finally respond to one. It was a popular app on Reddit for a reason, I'm sure, and I'm simply expressing my opinion on inviting ads and intrusive tracking to this platform.
I'm happily using Connect after using Jerboa for a month. Both work fine and Connect isn't perfect but it's been developed quicky with a lot of changes for user feedback, collects 0 data, has no ads, and offers the most important feature for me - the ability to filter keywords and block instances.
Reading all these threads about Sync makes me think about fanboys. The critics aren't welcome.
It was a snarky comment and I replied in kind. Criticism is fine but I like Sync and don't go around putting down other apps. I just use the one I like and support the developer.
Absolutely agree. Connect has come a long way since I left reddit when RIF died.
Wait what?
What has been added vs sync pro for reddit?
I was ready to drop a bunch of money to support the dev, but not if the app is loaded with tracking bullshit
The tracking is done by the ad SDK, not the app itself. The dev said the ad SDK will not be initialized if you purchase the one time ad removal option or subscription, so there will be no tracking at all. I actually confirmed this myself from my Adguard logs. No requests to ads and analytics domains after purchasing the subscription.
Nothing, same model as sync for reddit except no separate app available for pro or dev
I mean, it's not like Threads but for me anything more than 0 data collection is too much. I saw it linked in another post so I can't say exactly but you should be able to see specifically by finding it on your app store.
To be fair, the comments and posts you leave are technically being collected for display across the lemmyverse. In that sense, there's never going to be a zero data collection Lemmy client. Still, Liftoff currently has my vote. A decent little FOSS fork of Lemur, I believe.
Indeed, for better or worse nothing here is private. My instance database has all user activity stored even from other instances, such is the nature of ActivityPub.
https://www.iubenda.com/privacy-policy/28463889
Sync for Lemmy doesn't have trackers
KNOWN TO COLLECT
It doesn't mean it's collecting, DDgo is the worse app to do this, use the Exodus web
You said there are NO trackers and I see 146 tracking attempts. It doesn't matter how much data they collect, what you said is not right. Even the dev said that trackers are disabled when you get the ad free version which implies that trackers do exist otherwise. I have no horse in this race but it's hard to have a discussion when people use such definitive and inaccurate statements.
There's no trackers