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Can we have some clarification on what "Usage Data" the app collects and shares with advertisers? (lemmy.world)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/syncforlemmy@lemmy.world
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What constitutes Usage Data. Is it sharing the posts I view, communities I subscribe to etc?

Does paying for a premium version stop this data being collected?

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[–] 121 points 3 years ago (9 children)

Doesn't this ad/subscription model, go against the grain a bit? With Lemmy & the fediverse in general, being an opensource environment, which has no ads, & funded by donations, rather than a subscription model...

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  • [–] 88 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    No, it doesn't. Unlike Reddit, Twitter, or Threads, Lemmy offers a variety of apps. There are so many that there is something for everyone. Even a "professional" app that finances itself with advertising or a subscription is allowed. The special thing about Lemmy is the freedom of choice.

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  • [–] 73 points 3 years ago (5 children)

    Funding your project with donations is just not a realistic long-term goal. This is why so many instances fold up shop in just a couple of weeks as their servers are overloaded and no one donates money to keep it up.

    Capitalism is a problem but it doesn't mean everything has to be socialism. There can be an in-between.

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  • [–] 20 points 3 years ago*

    Capitalism is a problem but it doesn't mean everything has to be socialism. There can be an in-between.

    It's not even that to be honest. Socialism is characterized by worker ownership and operation of companies primarily. LJ is a sole proprietor exploiting nobody, not earning a wage via labor and not having to work because he under pays others to work for him. He's just a worker like the rest of us.

    I definitely agree that donations is not a viable long term path. Maybe in a different economic model. People need to be realistic. The general arguments they are making against Sync in favor of FOSS apps can also be made against them using FOSS apps by the FLOSS folks. People should pay if they can. And use a free third party app if they can't, or don't like how sync works.

    I really don't get the hate people are putting out there over this. This is why third party apps build strong ecosystems. You can find what you want.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 years ago* (1 child)

    I believe its possible, at least coming from the minecraft world. if the instance doesnt grow as big as lemmy.world or something then you can ask for patrons and other ways to get donations. a lot of the plugins I use for my minecraft servers are run this way and its the way i run my server, I just ask for a dollar donation if possible from my players and that covers a little bit more than what the server costs me to run. when I check some of the plugin's patreon page they pull in about 1k-8k a month
    https://www.patreon.com/coreprotect

    https://www.patreon.com/sonicether

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  • [+] 10 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (1 child)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 9 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    The reddit gold model didn't work. Reddit was a VC funded start up though, so if was expected to make a lot more than just enough to keep the servers going.

    I'd bet lemmy instances can get by on donations and reddit style awards. Like you say, it can be incentivized further with cosmetic rewards.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    Let's not follow reddit through the enshittification manifesto. There has to be another solution, and we won't find any if we allow ourselves to settle on the first half baked idea an already failing website had at some point.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago

    Even if it was socialism, that doesn't mean money doesn't exist lol, there would have to be some kind of tax added on for everyone to support the product/project/whatever.

    We have socialized fire departments in America, does that mean they don't get paid and work for free? Nah, but you don't get a bill before they put the fire out on your house either

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  • [–] 63 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    You're free to use any app you want. Some people prefer free open-source apps, some people want to pay for a quality app. It's good to have a choice unlike with Reddit. I don't understand people complaining about having additional choice because they don't like it.

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  • [–] 15 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Some people want to keep the Fediverse ecosystem completely pure in terms of free software, and they will yell at you if you don't play along.

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  • [–] 57 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I don’t have an issue with a reasonable subscription, but hard pass on trackers, especially when you’re paying.

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  • [–] 55 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    I would one time pay for this, but a subscription feels meh.

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  • [–] 17 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    There are plenty of apps for Lemmy, that aren't supported by ads, nor should they be, given the whole ethos of the fediverse..

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  • [–] 12 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (4 children)

    The ethos of the fediverse (insofar as it's completely free with no ads) won't be sustainable at scale; income for continued development and support does need to be taken into account at some point, and that goes for servers, frontends, apps, etc. Funding from donations only gets you so far. We will have to talk about it some day.

    However, it is entirely too soon for ads and subscriptions. This feels openly and brazenly like talking advantage of Sync overly enthusiastic fanclub and the Sync name recognition. Get in early with a big name and start making money before any other big name apps like Boost are released.

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  • [–] 15 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    Funding from donations only gets you so far.

    Then maybe that's as far as we should go?

    Wikipedia makes it work.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago)

    Another example would be lichess.org , which manages to compete with chess.com (a comercial site) and even pays the main developer a salary. All based purely on donations.

    I think it can definitely work even in the long run.

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  • [–] 9 points 3 years ago

    Too soon, being taken advantage of?

    The developer has a track record, we already know the product being delivered and the terms.

    The fan base are the people who were already using Sync for Reddit.

    The people who like me had used Sync for Reddit since 2017. Sync always had ads and the inherent tracking, I paid 2.69€ in Jan 2017 to remove ads and support the development.

    (When In 2022 the developer added another support level where you had access to early betas, I paid again 4.99€, because I'm an early adopter and wanted to support again because I never went the subscription route)

    I have also setup a monthly donation towards my Lemmy instance.

    It might feel too soon because Ljdawson moves fast.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago

    I feel like as long as your home instance can keep alive with donations then it will scale well. If your home instance starts needing a subscription or shows ads you could always migrate elsewhere. (But that's a pain I have already done that)

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    People have been saying some variant of "the fediverse won't work at scale if it stays free and without ads" for a decade now. And yet it keeps growing despite remaining free and without ads.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago

    What scale is it at and what scale are we comparing it to? For Lemmy the comparison is reddit, and there is absolutely no way donations would cover the sheer cost of compute required to compete with a user base of that size.

    I'm not going to bother looking into the numbers but I'm thinking all of the fediverse together doesn't even come close to that user base.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 years ago

    There is now a one time payment of $20 usd ($30 cad) to remove ads, an ongoing $20 cad a year subscription for ad free + additional services, or a one time, $99 usd payment for lifetime access to ad free + pro services.

    So a nice selection!

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  • [–] 20 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    My go-to analogy is Usenet. Back when usenet basically was the internet for a lot of people, you’d have access to a usenet server through your school, isp, or with a separate subscription to a usenet provider. Usenet itself was free and there were open source implementations of the client and server side components. There were also commercial implementations. The important thing was that net news ran on an open protocol that no company owned. Companies and individuals were free to do what they wanted.

    I would not hesitate to buy a client that achieved the functionality of Apollo, or even Alien Blue. I didn’t really start using reddit until I had a good client, and I can see client-side issues being a hurdle to lemmy adoption. I’d prefer paying for a client over ad support. Still, the free and open source client community should be core going forward. I can even see the potential for a commercial server, once the community reaches critical mass in terms of content.

    I’ve been involved with the foss community since my first linux install back in like 1994 or so. I remember when rms and esr were household names, so long as your household was a dorm room with cs majors. Like with linux (gnu/linux?) commercial and foss apps can co-exist, and like with linux there should remain a foss purist option in addition to the mixed mode option.

    I don’t think the fediverse is facing a threat of commercial takeover - certainly not the lemmyverse. If anything, the threat is not onboarding enough people to be competitive with whatever reddit clone manages to launch in the next year or so, and which has the commercial backing to drive users to the service and have stable, scalable, and production quality code.

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  • [–] 9 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    Just imagine: Microsoft creating a lemmy.xbox.com and creating centralized gaming communities like !halo@lemmy.xbox.com or !doom@lemmy.bethesda.com instead of hosting it on discord or reddit.

    The only issue I see with it are:

    • Liability: They would probably need to disable signups for external users and only allow federation And even then user submitted stuff could be tricky. Tbf (in a halo example I am familiar) they run forums so idk...
    • Ease of use: Lemmy is not easy to understand for aunt Emma or uncle Smitherson. Heck even regular parents are probably overwhelmed by the selection of communities on reddit...
    • Anything else?
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  • [–] 6 points 3 years ago

    This was my thought as well. It makes sense for companies to setup their own Fediverse instances. It provides them a way to reach their customers without having to rely on another company acting as the middleman.

    Mastodon is really solid and with the Dutch government and the BBC running their own instance I imagine others will follow suite.

    Still not sure about a Reddit replacement though since both Lemmy and kBin have their problems.

    Spin up a PeerTube instance and companies have an effective means of setting up discussion forums for their products, a news feed for broadcasting updates, and a video hosting solution that can all be tied together through the Fediverse.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 years ago

    I totally get that. I watched in real time when MS tried to kill Netscape by bundling Internet Explorer with Windows and used their “embrace and extend” business model to try to reserve the web for their proprietary browser. Ot didn’t work, but there was a lot of pushback both legally and socially.

    I think that we don’t have to worry about MS coming in for a while. I am interested to see how Facebook makes things work if and when they integrate Threads, but afaik no one is in an analogous position in terms of making a commercial, reddit-like experience tied to the fediverse.

    I mean, reddit’s model isn’t that great. They filed for an IPO on Dec 21 for $15B and since then have been marked down to about $5B, and that was before the APIpocalypse. That means that a) all of the current institutional and VC investors lost about 2/3 of their money and that spez and company have similarly seen their ineptitude slash their dreams of Musk-like wealth, and b) value-wise, they’re heading back to 2019 when they were smaller. It’s a terrible time for them to try doing an IPO. The fact that they haven’t pulled it makes it feel like they know the game of musical chairs is winding up and they just want to get out with even a quarter of what they expected.

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