I don’t understand the hate for charging for a product. I pay for a Mastodon client. If a Lemmy client that I really liked cost money and I felt the price was reasonable, I’d support that developer, too.
I would pay for a good native iOS App. Memmy is nice but apps using web frameworks always have more limitations than any native one.
Mlem is SwiftUI and FOSS! I know there are some issues with the current App Store build (weeps in janky scrolling) but we’ve got a major update hitting beta tomorrow and the App Store as soon as Apple will allow that’s going to fix it.
WOW! i did try out mlem in its early days, but since i browse lemmy mainly on ipad, it wasn’t for me so i moved to memmy
Just checked back on it and now the iPad experience is miles better than memmy. Guess i’m coming back to mlem
Great work guys! Looking forward to tomorrow’s testflight
My only gripe that makes me stay with Mlem is lack of any method of saving/sharing just the photo of a post.
EDIT: I meant Mlem, not Memmy.
Try Avelon: https://testflight.apple.com/join/IzB0ZiBO
This and Mlem are my favorites.
A lot of Lemmy consists of FOSS enthusiasts, so something that’s paid and proprietary wouldn’t look as good in their eyes.
There’s also the fact that the free version of Sync uses (Google?) ad tracking to show you ads, so those people would also be upset.
Lemmy instances run on servers which are funded by donations. I don’t see how Sync (which is made by one developer) gets to be frowned upon because there’s a price for ad removal. All FOSS projects are somehow funded, usually by donations. Nothing runs for free.
If we get to use all the FOSS Lemmy apps is because someone put in the time and money to make it happen.
I would happily pay for any FOSS app that I use, even for higher price than proprietary ones. I personally would prefer to use a FOSS app, if the UX is somewhat on par with the proprietary ones.
That being said, no judgement to people who prefer proprietary app. We all have different priorities, hence have to make different tradeoffs.
Nothing wrong at all with charging for the main version to support development as long as it’s not gouging. I don’t think this is gouging in the slightest.
I don’t think price gouging is even possible unless you control most or all of whatever resource. Sync is one of many apps to access Lemmy, and it isn’t forcing anyone to pay or even use it.
Oh yeah? What Mastodon client? I’ve just been using the 1st party client and I feel like it’s pretty decent. Kinda curious how much better a client might be.
Woolly is my client of choice. I used Ivory, too, but I really took to Woolly.
Mammoth is a great free alternative but lacks some of the polish (and has a horrible app icon lol)
I don’t understand the hate for charging for a product
I think the hate is mainly for the $100 lifetime payment. That’s a lot for some people.
$100 is lifetime Ultra, which is subscription otherwise. It’s $20 for lifetime removal of ads.
To build on what other people are saying, the $100 also is supposed to cover the cost of running servers and networks that the app has to use for the more unique, advanced features. Those are all things that will cost the developer to keep up and running - it’s honestly nice that you even have the option to pay for lifetime since, once you’ve used the app for six years, the dev is going to start losing money off of your using the app.
It’s not the charge money part. It’s that it charges money and then still grabs and sells toms of your data. That’s something the Lemmy crowd is super opposed to even in free products, but a subscription to have your data sold when the service itself (Lemmy) is hosted on a donation basis and does not cost the devs a cent to use is too much.
Most of that opposition is directed at the Sync devs of course, not against some user who has made the decision that the proposal is good and decided to use Sync.
It literally doesn’t do that. If you pay for it, the ad code doesn’t even initialize, thus performing no tracking. And crash analytics are optional.
At least, if we trust Laurence. I wish it was open source so we could verify, but I choose to trust him.
Hey, you do you. I’m weirded out that the app makes you accept all that stuff and is only one commented line away from collecting your stuff. But I’m not here to lecture others. If you enjoy the app and think it’s money well spent, I wish that you get out of it what you hope for and that’s enough for me.
Oh no $20 to remove ads from an app that was made by one guy as his full time job. I’m proud to support anyone who works hard to make a more accessible, more enjoyable experience.
Oh no ads track you! My full time job is literally managing Google ads. We barely tracked you personally as it was. We could anonymously target generally the things you were interested in buying or what you’ve recently been looking at online.
And then Google crippled Google Analytics and it’s a shell of what it once was, and your data is even more anonymous!
If I work for a lawnmower company I couldn’t give a shit who you are or what you do online, all I care about is if you’re thinking about buying a lawnmower, so my client can show you what he’s got to offer. Then you can ignore the ads if you don’t like the product or its price point. That’s what Google does.
I’d rather that than be shown “Generic Chinese cashgrab mobile game ad that doesn’t actually reflect the gameplay” ads.
The guy worked hard to make possibly the best UI/UX on the platform. Either pay for his work or let him get the (barely any) money from showing ads to pay for his time. Either way, he worked for it.
Do you work full time for free too?
I don’t think most people worry about lawnmowing company. They worry about Google.
What google essentially sale is manipulation: they make money by changine your behavior, which is a extermely dangerous business in a democratic society. What makes it even more dangerous are
- It is a for-profit company, which means people with more money have more power to manipulate the general public
- It caters to U.S. government (since it is based in the U.S.), which is one of the most imperialistic governments today, with a terrible record of over-surveillance.
- Everything can be hacked, all the information that is stored will be leaked sooner or later. And these data can easily fall into the wrong hand; in fact, they tends to fall into the wrong hand.
That’s all perfectly sensible things to be concerned about. But given that we’re talking about an android app - if you’re eligible to use the app, Google almost certainly already has all your data anyways.
Yeah I’m sure there’s a tiny subsection of the people in these discussion who have custom ROMs flashed, but the vast majority are posting about Google tracking them on a google phone - or (even more annoyingly) posting about it from a phone that doesn’t even support the app, and so doesn’t remotely affect them
You raise a valid point, ~~but your original answer, to me, seems to normalize tracking to some extend: “since lawnmowing company dont care about your data, hence ads that tracks you is nit a big deal”, which is not the case. ~~
EDIT: I thought I was replying to someone else.
I think a better argument is that “since you are already on android, so google will have all your data anyway”.
That being said, one final bit of nits, even if you are on a google phone, google probably dont watch your every move. With every new place to interact with ads, there is more chance people will be tracked. Finally, I think the more one relying on google service the harder is to move them on a degoogled platform. So adding google ads to an app is definitely not harmless. But like you said, these probably dont matter to 95% of people.
There are companies that aggregate all the data from Google and other services to match your anonymous data to your actual person so they can match your address name and all personal information to what you do online
@ZippyZiggurat @drekly, it’s called create incommings by surveillance advertising, I call it Spyware as is.
They sell your data to third parties, which apart of a violation of your privacy rights, is a big security risk, nobody can control how your data is traty and protected, several cases of dataleaks with even bank and medical data prove this. There are other methodes to create incommings which don’t invade privacy.
Not this way
(Test made with Blacklight https://themarkup.org/blacklight )
The ads are what supports the developer. $20 to remove them is just a better bulk upfront deal than waiting for fractions of pennies to come together over time. The $100 version is a straight up grift though. I cannot overstate this, the ads are what supports the dev. There is nobody here not getting paid for their work.
A Sync user loves Lemmy enough to pay for it and isn’t wrapped up in drama spun by FOSS advocates. Be proud.
That being said, I love FOSS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_software?wprov=sfla1
Had to look it up
Almost thought it was an app 🤣
Yeah nah fuck that Sync hate, I don’t use it personally but if someone wants to use it, all the best to them and have a jolly ride in the lemmy part of the fediverse
I like sync because I don’t have to interact with or smell the poors. Good job sync team 👍
Actually I’d invite the FOSS developers to learn from UI of sync. If they get better, I’ll switch to FOSS apps, I’d contribute to FOSS if I had the time, but I don’t and their UI does feel unpolished. Used liftoff and jerboa before sync.
But… This analogy doesn’t work at all. Sync isn’t a community, it’s a client. So you’re interacting with the same people.
