Not hating on open source, just let people use what fits their expectations and needs and stop deterring them with gatekeeping :P
UX = user experience
This one dude has made this app for years and constantly updates it, fixes things, is responsive, and makes a great app. He’s now been more loyal to his users longer than Reddit has, and I personally have used his app daily for 13 years.
Yeah, I’ll happily pay for it.
FOSS is great but it doesn’t pay the rent people, this guy is doing this mostly as his main gig. This isn’t some huge corpo, it’s one guy who makes his living building the app he loves. I’m sure he’d love to make it FOSS if he didn’t have to pay bills on anything.
FOSS can pay the rent. But the users that will complain about £20 for a lifetime of ad removal, definitely aren’t going to be the ones that help him should the bank come calling about late mortgage payments.
This is the same crap I left /r/Linux for way back in the day, so so so many people who are all “Linux is the best way and you’re stupid for even considering windows or mac” but unable to see realities. Yes, of course I love linux and FOSS, I use it as my primary driver, but we live in a society where free work doesn’t pay for housing.
You’re exactly right, most of the “FOSS Open Source supreme” people will look at an app that was lovingly crafted for months, call it garbage, and then demand they make it free. I just can’t even with them.
Meanwhile I’d love to see the stats on how many hours a week they put into FOSS apps on their own, and if they’ve given up their jobs to code for FOSS apps for the good of the community.
I’m a developer. I code mostly proprietary stuff for my company. I’d gladly go code for FOSS projects, but so far my bank is just completely unwilling to cancel my mortgage payments, and my electricity, water, sewer, internet, they all want to be paid too, so unfortunately I’m stuck doing this.
Seriously, I honestly feel like this is a bad look for Lemmy right now. Like who cares how people enjoy Lemmy? Also, why do people care so much about how others spend their money?
Some of these people don’t even realize they are using a closed source app (connect) and have no problem with it, but when price is introduced all of a sudden people are up in arms.
Don’t like the price? Continue to use Sync(with ads) or use the other plethora of FOSS alternatives.
I think the issue a lot of folks have is people like yourself always connecting it back to profit/salary. A large portion of us are interested in Linux/technology/foss for personal reasons and this corporate stuff not only reeks but makes enough noise to drown out better long term solutions. Yes I do it professionally too and yes I fight the good fight but we do what we need to do, this dude does not need to do this. UX really just isn’t important when we’re talking about expanding human capabilities, or I should say UX is important but pretty things aren’t. My opinion anyway but I was raised to care about this stuff by one of those wizard beards so to see your attitude is prevalent just sucks, no disrespect and nothing personal.
Lemmy doesn’t have ads. If you have to pay to remove them don’t you think something is wrong with that? Why not pay for the community and useful features instead?
The ads finance the app, I think that’s perfectly fine (in principle).
I asked the dev a few weeks ago, this app is literally his livelihood. And he has a pretty good track record of delivering good software. Why not support him?
You’re not paying to remove ads from Lemmy. You can continue using Lemmy ad-free on mobile via the mobile site or any of the other PWA’s or native apps. What you’re paying to remove ads from is Sync. The developer has decided that they need to be compensated to sustain the amount of effort developing and maintaining the app requires. If you don’t want to pay that price with cash or your eyeballs then don’t use it.
Nobody is forcing you to use Sync, nobody is forcing you to see ads. The beauty of a platform like Lemmy is you have the choice to use whatever client you want. That doesn’t mean you’re entitled to any of them.
So for one he’s adding an option to fund your instance as well, but also just because it’s an app doesn’t mean that it also doesn’t require money.
Your argument doesn’t come off as “so both should be free” but to me more like “oh yeah I’m surprised Lemmy doesn’t have an ad option”
I understand people’s concerns and criticism over the use of Google-based ads, but I have no issue paying for no ads knowing how much work has been put into the app. I’m glad we have some great FOSS options as well (shoutout to Infinity and Thunder, among others!)
Google ads are really the only ones worth a damn. Easy to sign up, they pay very well, and their libraries are incredibly easy to implement.
The alternative is some no-name you’ve never heard of that requires you to apply for entry to use their platform and serves you virus ads.
Pick one
You can make it FOSS and still have some sort of subscription for syncing between devices for example. Tasks.org did it like that.
Not to mention that you can run something on donations like lichess or F-Droid and have some extra money.
NPM did donations too and found that <0.01% of users paid anything, and the average for even the most used packages made on average $40 a month. That doesn’t pay a full time fry cook, let alone developer
I remember this being a problem on GitHub where developers would full on attack NPM packages that requested funding or donations in the installer.
Core-js had a really rough ride with that one, and babel (one of their main users) could not spare any development time to work on it, in the absence of the single maintainer.
It’s kind of disappointing in FOSS circles how some just refuse to acknowledge that devs need to eat - not everyone codes open source software as a side/passion project in spare time.
Scatterbrained me sometimes forgets to add more context, because I forget other people can’t see what’s been going on in my head prior. Now you know how people at work feel when interacting with me.
Or when I do a “by the way…” remark to something that was discussed hours before and nobody knows what I’m referring to.
My brain could be used to feed entropy to /dev/urandom
why are you talking about my brain in your comment but referring to it as YOUR brain?
FOSS is great but also developers’ gotta eat
Amen. And he got screwed from the Reddit api fiasco. If i remember correctly he was on the hook for as much as $250k in refunds because he’s had to shut the app down and refund subscribers.
The guy has to make a living, so I don’t begrudge him that one bit.
How fucking bad does your math need to be to not realize that 250k in refunds for a 6 month period where the app is unusable equals 250k in revenue for the first 6 months of the year? All y’all are like “dev needs to eat, he deserves our support!” and the guy’s pulling down over 500k/year.
So he should start working for free? Or just retire and not create an app that many people enjoy?
I love the idea of Lemmy itself being FOSS but individual instances and apps being a competitive marketplace of for profit businesses.
That way profitable entities with skin in the game can contribute back to the core, as can anyone, while ensuring the communities exist on servers that actually have some kind of monetization.
Exactly! This is the playbook for how Linux has gained such a mainstay - while GNU/Linux on the desktop may still be pretty small, the extensibility and open-source nature of the platform has meant it’s been able to take over on all sort of alternative platforms - Android and Steam Deck being the big ones in the consumer space, but also larger distros being used regularly in enterprise/web hosting.
If everyone had refused to embrace Android or Steam Deck or any of the other distros run and maintained by for-profit corporations due to some preconceived idea of what the ‘correct’ way to use Linux is, it would still be doomed to irrelevance outside of tech circles.
but also larger distros being used regularly in enterprise/web hosting.
Red Hat is the 800lb gorilla in the room in that aspect. They put out a rock-solid product and their support is probably the best I’ve ever used regardless of any other factor.
They also pretty much own the Government/Gov Contractor Linux space because of the support and how simple it is to apply STIGs.
I don’t think apps have to be FOSS. It’s super important for libraries, frameworks and other infrastrucuture related stuff to be FOSS, but you can always change a client.
I totally agree! I would much rather use lemmy with a proprietary client than reddit with a FOSS client. But when I have the choice to install something from f-droid instead of aurora store, its an easy choice. Also, wefwef works perfectly for me, so why install anything at all xD
I use sync, but I think they still should be FOSS, or at least open source. Just because when anything gets left behind or never fixed, you can take it and patch it up yourself. That includes clients too, lots of good clients that get left behind because Dev stopped and whatever they were interfacing with changed.
