this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
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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.
The ads/subscription support the developer, who works on this as his full time job. This means we get a better app.
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?
There's no contradiction. It's just a free market. Reddit charged an absurd amount for their API and offered an inferior product as the only alternative. So people left.
If a Lemmy instance wants to charge for access or serve ads, that's fine too. But they better have some competitive advantage or people will leave for an instance that doesn't do that.
Another difference between Reddit and Sync is the scale. I support my local coffee shop over Starbucks for the same reason.
Funny how no one expects a coffee shop to run on donations.
I'm fine with paying for a service I like and I did subscribe to reddit for many years. But even though I was a subscriber they cut off access to my apps. So screw them.
I understand that nothing's free so I plan to donate to lemmy.world to help them with their costs.
I'm getting tired of people telling me what Lemmy is supposed to be about.
Every individual instance has their own goals that are completely independent from the core Lemmy project. If the creators of Lemmy don't like that they shouldn't have made it open source.
This exactly
Lemmy choosing not to serve ads doesn't mean nobody else is allowed to. I have no issues with Sync serving ads at all. Heck, I wouldn't even care if Lemmy served them. People have a right to be paid a reasonable amount for their effort
This is more relevant for Lemmy than client apps, but the problem with relying on ads is that you then become beholden to the ad-buyers.
I think that can be mitigated by operating as a non-profit that is not seeking to launch a multi-billion IPO at some point in the future, however. Decentralization is the answer to the "growth problem" that the last decade of failed tech investments has constantly run into.
Depends on what you mean by beholden to them. Unless you're partnering directly with certain ad providers it's pretty much plug-and-play: you can just choose to not optimize for serving ads.
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.
Just don't use the app. This isn't rocket science.
Sync is still just one guy so it's not some mega corp. I don't like ad monetization model either but with the few apps I use regularly I'll pay to remove.