I think now is a great time to remind everyone, like sync's developer, Lemmy's developers need to be paid too! The amount of time all the devs put into making lemmy exist, in my opinion, should be worth some of your money. If you can afford it, donating to the people who develop lemmy and/or the people keeping your home instance up will accelerate the incredible growth of lemmy!

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[–] Rac3r4Life 39 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Personally, I think the app is absolutely fine without paying for the subscription. I really don't see too many ads. I get an average of one ad for every two refreshes of the feed when scrolling through, and none of them have been obtrusive. It's certainly night and day when compared to the ads in the official Reddit app.

[–] indianactresslover 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I'm not seeing many ads tbh. However, I'm damn sure that it'll be ad-filled after sometime, specially since they are charging so much for the ad-free.

[–] Kavhow 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I mean it's just a port of the Reddit version that was made by the same dev and had been around for over a decade (with constant updates and improvements), I don't think enshittification is a given.

[–] jarfil 4 points 1 year ago

Well, compared to Reddit getting filled with "ad looking like real post", and "ad written as a comment", and "mass downvote everyone except the ad"... it's really hard to stoop that low.

What is likely to keep Sync in check, are the alternative apps. Reddit got enshittified because it became the single point of failure.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago

I don't think it's a given and the dev has a proven track record.

...buuuuuutttt they did move to a much smaller userbase so I wonder how many ads he will need for sustainability.

[–] UnculturedSwine 5 points 1 year ago

Depends on if their business model works. If enough people are paying for premium and using the free version of the app to pay for development, there is no reason for them to increase the amount of ads. In fact, if they do show too many ads, it will likely push a lot of users to alternate apps.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

The ads weren't terrible on the free Reddit version, they're just inline ads between posts.

There may have been a banner on some galleries but I'm not sure if that's carried over also.

[–] Thisisforfun 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I run all my traffic through a slightly anonymizing VPN service that also blocks ads. Turns out the ads here are also blocked 🥳

[–] Rac3r4Life 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Same. I have a PiHole on my home network and it blocks the ads in Sync. I still see the empty box where the ad would be though. If I am out of the house the only way I can get that ad blocking back is by connecting to my home VPN server.

[–] Thisisforfun 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

In my experience, AdGuard has a more useful (free for home use) server that mirrors the pihole service. It's more customizable, and this bit is probably the key here, and you can have different rules for different devices/network numbers

[–] Rac3r4Life 1 points 1 year ago

I can make different rules based on the device group with PiHole.