this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
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Liftoff!
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A mobile client for Lemmy running on iOS and Android
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Yeah, one glance at the terms of use had me uninstalling the app. I don't feel like "decentralized social media" and "sale of personal data" pair well together.
It's like people are trying to misinterpret.
Liftoff is strictly using Lemmy's free API and for the developer 5 users or 5M users doesn't make a difference to his expenses.
The Sync developer is obviously trying to do something more ambitious.
It's great that we have FOSS apps that do a decent job but we shouldn't look down on developers who put a lot of time, effort, and money into something expecting to make a return on their investment.
I don't like data collecting either but I accept that if you want to offer a free version - it's inevitable. What I hate is when you're not able to pay for ads to go away.
But I might be biased as I'm a developer myself and would hate to put 8-9 weeks of hard work into delivering a great app and then get hate for wanting to get something in return for that work.
You've been able to pay for ads to go away for about the last 16hrs, the update to B25 dropped last night.
The original plan was not to release version like that until it was more polished, but the masses have spoken and been listened to almost immediately.
In terms of data collection, LJD is literally just bothered about Crashlytics.
I am honestly fine with giving these permissions for a free version of the app as I understand the developers need to monetize with ads for the free version. What I would like to see though that the paid version with subscription is another app that does not ask for these permissions. If I am paying for the app to remove ads and/or get additional paid features, the app seemingly still collects that data. As a user I have no way to tell what the developer is doing with that data. Is it only to retain sessions / enable features or is my data being given to third parties regardless if I pay or not
Hm, what exactly? It doesn't seem to have any particularly remarkable features 🤨
Sounds like you didn't actually try the app. It's super fast and smooth. Lots of customization, great UI. I happily pay for that effort.
Sync will surely make the lemmy ecosystem more attractive and bring in a ton more people, which is a great thing for everyone here whether you use the app or not.
Ok, so I have been trying out Sync... and well, yes, the UI is slightly better, but most of the "fancy" stuff is only in the paid version... which is kind of steep for stuff I could wait a year or two without.
Most interesting feature I've seen, is the search function, but it still fails in many places, so that's somewhat bittersweet. Curiously, it's one of the free ones, so... well, I guess I'll leave it installed for a while and see how things go.
More people isn't great. It's how social media begin to sink. It was like this on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.
Yeah, Google+ was such a hit thanks to its lack of users
There is an optimum. But, the more is the best isn't true for communities and social media.
Maybe, but we are waaaay under that "optimum" right now, so for now the more is the best
Optimum doesn't mean a lot or infinity. It varies from community to community and social platform to social platform.
Reddit peaked sometimes ago. But Lemmy is not reddit and it's not focused on the grow.
I've been pretty frustrated with the gatekeeping and no true Scotsman crap going on with Lemmy lately. I'm even trying sync. But this is an area where I think the refugees need to start listening.
Infinite growth is not the only goal a community could ever want. And it's not the goal of many Lemmy instances. An active community is good enough, in most cases.
The problem with those sites was not the amount of users.
Tons of more options and a faster and smoother interface. And moving subscriptions across instances is coming. And it has cloud sync.
But I agree, it's quite pricy for the extra bells and whistles.
Migrating accounts across instances is a pending Lemmy core feature, the server part has to sort that out.
Liftoff's interface seems fast and smooth to me, only thing I might be missing is some sort of "multireddits" or Mastodon-like "timelines" to sort things out a bit better, but using multiple accounts kind of works too.
I mean it's probably better if the server has it, but it can be implemented client side too. All the information about a users subs is right there in the api.
And it feels like the server devs have their hands full, so features like this could be quite some time.
This sounds exactly like the conversations we have at work. Cries in frontend.
I'm backend. :)
Can you PLEASE not send empty result sets with a next token then?
I mean... That's the only fun we have around here.
That's entirely fair. That's why I went more frontend. The tiniest visual tweak always ends in negative feedback. It's super fun.
The language on Sync Ultra is "Import / export subscriptions (Easily move between instances)"
Nothing more than what the free apis do.
Well yeah, but I think the apis are enough. There are already utilities using those apis to copy subscriptions.
"Something" is $115 for the lifetime subscription. I paid $35 for the same thing 13 months ago, and it was $3 before that. He didn't exactly build the app from scratch either. It's greed, so I'll be getting the cracked version on Mobilism as soon as it's released
One time ad removal is $20, the ultra subscription is clearly a very different thing so.
You don't think it's unusual that he's more than tripled the price of Ultra? After selling a "lifetime" sub 13 months ago? This is a total swizz
And yet you expect to be able to use the software they produce for free
I lean on the same opinion, and it's not like that at all, if Liftoff or whichever application were to be on the store with a pricetag they would probably even be happy to pay for it, this is not about cost for us users, it's about being sold to trackers and advertisers and it being proprietary. You can argue that if the developer made it open source then someone would have just forked it off without all the restrictions and privacy problems and that version would have effectively taken the place of the original, that may or may not be true, it seems like a lot of people are faithful to the original developer.
If it were to happen though, I think it would speak numbers on the practice itself, this is fundamentally an ethical issue, the developer made an application that he maintained over the years, I have huge respect for that in and of itself, he also made it paid for, absolutely fine still, but the free version has ads, that's not cool, not because ads are bad, but because the current ad landscape depends on tracking/profiling the users who consume them, now he will have made a fair bit of money in all these years so I'd say he already reaped the benefits of his own work, that doesn't mean he's not allowed to make more money off it, but as long as his work was based on another proprietary platform (Reddit) I'd say the ethics of it were in a gray area, kind of understandable, now he adapts his app to a new platform (Lemmy) that doesn't monetize its users and is libre software (can't go further than AGPL) and he keeps his app proprietary and with the very same downsides as before, not only that, it costs more, even though there are no API costs and the transition to it couldn't have cost him some ungodly amount of effort to implement, but that's beside the point, everyone names their price, I may not agree with it, but it's not a bad thing per se. What I'm not ok with is how he's half profiting off some other people's work, i.e. the server developers, I think it's morally wrong, but I would have never thought that if, for instance, he made it open source with no ads trackers and sold it for any amount (20€? 30€? Idk) on the Play Store. You probably wouldn't agree with me simply because ethics are subjective and free software is a matter of ethics, not money, I care about it because, to a certain extent (I'm not a maximalist) I care for my own freedom in computing and black boxes just hurt a free ecosystem.
It asks for consent to personalize ads / sell your data, you can say no. I did, and I just see a black square with "Sponsored Content" in the centre, no ad, probably a bug.
You can also pay for the version without ads; there's Ultra, but Sync Pro one time purchase will be available soon.
I used Sync Pro for Reddit for years, it was awesome. Liftoff is great, and I recommend it, but I'm going to use Sync Pro.