So you are ok with ads and paid subscriptions to remove them, but you aren’t ok with Reddit charging for access to its API? How do you reconcile the contradiction here? Reddit developers have to eat too. They are just a business trying to make money. What if Lemmy instances started charging for its API and priced out third party apps then added ads/subscription to their own app? All just part of the cycle?
Part of the purpose of moving from Reddit to Lemmy is that a for profit corporation making money off of the free content of users was considered bad. I might even say this was the main point of contention and thought that spawned the creation of Lemmy. A free open platform where the users are more in control of their own content. Adding ads back into the mix means that somebody is profiting again off of the free content of the users. On principal this goes against the purpose of Lemmy. You may as well just use Reddit as the end goal of monetizing the fediverse is basically going to end up the same.
So for Sync to not be against the spirit of Lemmy it would need to remove its free version with ads so that the only thing you are paying for is the app itself and not for the content without ads.
I think you are missing the problem here. Paying for a good product or extra features is one thing. Paying to remove the ads that you added in the first place is another. Lemmy is funded entirely by donations and doesn’t have any ads.
It’s a pretty bad look that is fundamentally against the goals of Lemmy as ad free an open platform with a free API. Otherwise we are going to go down the same rabbit hole again and again like what happened with Reddit.
I’m not suggesting that they should or even can be forced to change or that lemmy.world admins actually do anything differently.
It’s also not about the cost or not being able to afford it. It is about principles and and the ad driven business model being antithetical to the goals of Lemmy. Being federated is one thing, but it is also about moving away from ads. I am fully in support of nearly any monetization of software other than ads and selling user data.
Personally I just can’t understand the person who would agree that Reddit was being egregiously corporate minded and greedy to the point that they move to Lemmy and then be ok with adding ads were there previously were none. I’m definitely not going to be using it and I don’t even care that much despite my comments here if other people do. I just want to make this point known. I don’t want Lemmy to become Reddit all over again and I felt there was a bit of an honor system in place to not do things like that and it has already been broken.
Another point of contention with ads is that everyone is generating the content for free that Sync is injecting ads next to. I don’t want to help them make money off of something I do as a hobby even if it is only pennies. This is one of the main reasons I won’t use Reddit and have been favor of the federated internet.
If true that is a real deal breaker for me. The whole idea of Lemmy is to break away from exploitative data gathering from corporations. If they are data gathering to sell to third parties then what makes them any different than Reddit? 🫤
If I had to guess most of that info is just to feed you ads, but that is already bad enough for me.
I completely agree with someone trying to make some money off of their app, but when it comes to Lemmy I can’t agree with injecting ads just so people have to pay to remove them. If it were just about the added bonus features then it would be a lot more acceptable.
Lemmy doesn’t have ads and the instance hosters rely entirely on donations.
I must say, this is pretty uncool of Sync for Lemmy developers.
I played Destiny 2 when it came out, but then they kept releasing more and more DLC and expansions I didn’t feel like buying for how little content there was. My plan was to simply wait until the entirety of the game was released so I could buy the rest of everything in a single purchase and play it all.
I think I heard recently they have been actually removing old content so this plan no longer makes sense.
I can nearly guarantee you that once you download it from Steam servers that it will require the Battle.net launcher.
When you design a new device from the ground up you make them fit in a way that allows the remaining space to be a single large rectangle to be entirely filled with battery. This might require custom PCB to have some L shapes. If you want to target a specific weight and having that much battery is too heavy then you make the device thinner. Instead it looks like they took pre-existing components from other devices such as Pixel phones or the Google Home and put them in a larger case.
It’s not necessarily a problem that this device exists how it is, but that it is a cheap way to go about it and yet still sold at a premium price.