Mastodon is Rewinding the Clock on Social Media — in a Good Way
Mastodon is Rewinding the Clock on Social Media — in a Good Way
A comment on a Hacker News thread inspired me to contemplate why Mastodon is everything we loved about social media before…
In many ways, Mastodon feels like rewinding the clock on social media back to the early days of Twitter and Facebook. On the consume side, that means that your home feed has no algorithm (this can be disorienting at first).
Practically, it means that you see only what you want to see and only see it linearly. You never wonder “why am I seeing this and how do I make it go away?”. Content can only enter your home feed via your followed tags or handles and the feed is linear like the early days of social media.
You're viewing a single thread.
Put it simply I just hate ads. Anything that puts in ads is terrible. Including Sync for Lemmy who seems to have completely missed the point of getting the hell away from Reddit.
The next terrible thing is automatically generated content and bots, but I guess those are also really just ads.
I disagree. I hate ads with a passion too. But as long as we can pay a sum to remove it, it is fair to have a free option with ads. A kinda unlimited "demo".
We are fools for thinking anyone would give away their own time and effort for free forever. We have completely lost the perspective of how much things should cost because of how much we've taken for granted that was paid for with our personal data. And the biggest fools is those who think most software developers and server admins can live reliably on donations alone.
Though Youtube is taking the ads a bit far, maybe. One shouldn't scare away users before they have even become customers.
Absolutely agree with your comment.
I don't really know the solution either... I can't afford to pay for all the things I enjoy online.
I was considering supporting 1 Twitch streamer I enjoy until I saw subscription cost. And if I paid that for every streamer or YouTuber I enjoy, I'd be broke in a single day lol.
I get so much incredibly good info and discussions online about my hobbies, all for no charge.
I used to subscribe on Patreon to my most useful resources/people, but in the end I just could afford it and had to cancel all my Patreon
I hate ads but I don't understand how the internet would function without ads. No one could afford it
Yeah, I'm not rich enough to pay for every site and service either. A site like rockpapershotgun I left when it paywalled most of its contents, it wasn't important enough to me to pay for. I've never paid for reddit, but i probably should have by how much i used it. Not that I will do that after what they've pulled lately. I donate to a fediverse server to put my money where my mouth is and at least pay for what I want to keep alive.
It would take some adjustment, but ads and data harvesting are the core problem to the enshiftification of the entire internet. You can't have it both ways. We have this endless game of cat and mouse where we keep moving to the next platform after the last one becomes unusable due to ads and data harvesting.
You have to draw the line somewhere to end this pointless cycle and it is either pay for software and services or have people do only what they want to when they want to (FOSS). It really doesn't cost that much if it isn't attempting to compete with other software that grew with ad and data harvesting money.
I think you're wildly underestimating the cost of people's time, resources, infrastructure etc
"You can't have it both ways" is exactly right. If the internet was user funded, as in, the user subscribes to every website or internet service they wish to use, then the internet would probably stop existing. (maybe I'm being too dramatic but also maybe not)
What's the true cost of YouTube without ads or data harvesting? Probably only the rich could afford a subscription, which in turn would destroy the platform user base.
It's not because Lemmy is FOSS it doesn't cost any money. Infrastructure costs and the time invested by those that help the fediverse grow is a cost too. Be it the time invested by the people running instances or those writing custom ui's, tools and yes even Lemmy apps. And if some people prefer to be compensated what's wrong with that? You think the Lemmy devs are doing it for free?
I don't see the relevance to my opinion that ads are bad, but it is an opinion that Lemmy developers also share. Also for the 1000th time there is nothing wrong with selling software. I just disagree with ads and data harvesting.
Then simply don't use sync and use a free option. Lemmy developers are being paid...
Agreed, but even if free ad tiers exist, web trackers have to also exist to track everything you do, just in case you use the ad tier again.
Privacy shouldn’t be something unaffordable.
Um Linux and FOSS, kinda show you wrong in that many people are happy to see others use their work for feee.
We are fools for thinking capitalist solutions are the solutions we need.
Major Linux contributors are payed by their employers to work on the kernel.
So you really believe that FOSS is only developed by people doing this for free. Not saying there are no hobby projects developed by people in their free time but thinking that is how it works is pretty dumb. Postgresql, Mozilla, various Linux distributions providing "business solutions" - hell, even the Lemmy developers are funded.
You are a fool if you think all Foss developers are anticapitalist idealists.
I disagree. Paying to remove ads is one of the core problems with ads. If the only way to develop your software is either to frustrate them enough to pay to remove ads or have ads then your software shouldn't exist. You don't get to do something bad just because there is an option to pay them to stop doing that bad thing. That doesn't make it right. The whole concept is basically like a really mild protection racket.
This is such an unbelievably naive take. People's time is worth something. Relying just on donations from a small percentage of users here and there is not going to cut it for someone who is developing the software full time.
No, can't you see? There is no way to enjoy Lemmy without Sync.
There are plenty alternatives which is great. I think it's just an absurd take to bash a solo dev who is working on an app as their full time job for trying to make money.
The second ads are required the customer stops being the users and starts being the advertisers. This starts the enshittification
snowballshitball, Randers.It's a good thing you have the option to pay to remove ads and stay the customer, then
Legit. I paid $3 for Sync back in 2014 and used it daily for nine years.
I'm working on the app full-time and the ads / subscriptions cover development costs.
I just wanted to say I greatly appreciate everything that you've done for reddit/lemmy in app development. Without Sync I'm not sure how I'd browse the web without pulling out all my hair due to all the ads and inconsistencies.
(シ_ _)シ
That isn't a good justification to me. If it's ok for you then it's ok for the rest of the world too. You might believe ads aren't bad and that's fine. At least we can agree to disagree on that as our opinions aren't reconcilable. If your app can't exist without ads then I don't believe it should exist at all. Or any other software in the world.
It can exist without ads, and does, but not everyone is willing to compensate his time and effort with money
That isn't a good justification to me.
You want developers who spent years studying design and development, to spend months developing an app, to just give that app away for free?
People like you are why more and more developers join big corporations for salaried position rather than trying to make it by themselves in the indie scene. Because they know they can't make it in the indie scene because you are too cheap to pay for their apps (either by buying the app, or by consenting to see ads)
If your app can't exist without ads then I don't believe it should exist at all.
Sync for Lemmy exists as a paid, ad-free version. The ad-supported version only exists for people who don't want to, or can't, buy the app.
If not ad-supported, how would you propose a free product earn revenue to stay free?I see further down discussion addresses my question.
When's the last time you developed and released a full fledged software project for free?
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Lemmy has gotten quite a bit of money in grants. It's safe to say that without the grants allowing the lemmy devs to work on it full time, it wouldn't be as functional as it is now. Getting grants really isn't easy and that shouldn't be the barrier to whether or not you can be compensated for your work.
Edit: Nvm, just realised you're not OP
If you are suggesting ads are the only way to fund software then you are mistaken. For example you can sell it for money to consumers.
Which... Sync does. So why are you bashing on it?
It still has ads. It can't take the moral high ground of selling software if it also has a free with ads version to try and convince people to subscribe. Get rid of the ad version and only sell the software and then it will actually have some integrity.
Wait... So you're arguing... Less options is BETTER? That somehow if they took away the choice of seeing ads and made payment mandatory, instead of giving users the choice, that would be more moral?
WTF?
Obviously less options isn't better in all circumstances. When of the options happens to be predatory then yes obviously it is better to not allow such a thing.
Imagine you have two options. You can either pay a one time fee of $50 or you can borrow the $50 and pay back $2 a month with 75% interest. Is allowing people the option to accidentally pay 5 times the amount something is valued better? Not that this situation is completely analogous to what is going on with Sync, but the point is to demonstrate that there exists a circumstance that less options is better for the consumer. Or at least a circumstance where having the only option has more integrity.
The best option I see for Sync that doesn't implement ads at all and thus being bad is to have a less featured version for free and then sell premium features. Or of course just sell the whole thing with no free version. There is also a the concept of a limited demo so you can try before you make your decision to purchase. There are so many things you can do that don't involve ads.
Yeah, no. I think that's a ridiculous opinion to have. FOSS is all about personal choice, yet here you are arguing that choices should be limited because you personally don't like one of the options. We're just going to have to disagree on this.
A ridiculous opinion to have is that ads are bad, except for this one particular situation. If you want to convince me that this is ok then you need to at least hold the opinion that ads aren't bad and then go from there.
Wrong. The next terrible thing is mass-AI-generated propaganda and disinformation. Like in the "dead internet" theory
Next? I think you misspelled "current":-D
My bad. But I think we haven't seen the full extent of it yet
Tbf, it seems like the current "mass-AI-generated propaganda and disinformation" has actual humans behind it i.e. state-sponsored disinformation as part of modern warfare, as opposed to just sheer random BS pooped out of an algorithm designed to maximize short-term profits for the person trying to use enough buzzwords to get their algorithm bought out by someone dumb enough to fall for their pitch and short-sighted enough to not realize the wider implications... or worse yet, if they realize, who simply does not care.
It reminds me of the story behind the USA tax preparation software companies who intentionally went on a campaign to confuse military veterans and students (seriously!? what kind of evil mfers...!?), and while they got caught and even punished & fined, it was something like a decade later and ofc the original CEO and also the next one etc. had long since received their fat bonus checks, leaving the company holding the bag (liability). Thus it was "a smart move", so long as you entirely disregard ethics. What was presented as a "free gift", to generate good PR for the company, was in reality predating upon people that they deemed would be highly trusting or at least minimally likely to sue them... and they were correct. Now, watching interviews of these tech-bros, I get the same vibe as in like who cares so long as I get mine.
Web of trust solves this problem, until people start intentionally trusting AIs as much as they do other humans, at which point it's no longer a problem.
I just paid the one time fee for no ads. Works for me.
This is only FOSS bros making a bigger deal than it should, I like FOSS I use FOSS but they need to chill a bit.
Seriously
I hate ads too, but devs have to eat so why should we not pay them when we use an app or service they spend countless time making and maintaining?
Sync is a one-time payment of £17.99 / $20 to remove ads and for the amount I'll be using this app, I think that's absolutely fair. I'll spend more on one takeaway pizza on a Friday night.
It would suck if Sync was the only option but it's not. Nobody forces you to use it. You have such a hateboner for Sync it's ridiculous. So the guy asks money for his work, who fucking cares.
It just happens to be a great demonstration that there can be no exceptions to eliminating ads. People seem to agree that ads are bad, but then have no principles or conviction when presented with the slightest inconvenience. "Guy just needs money" is not a good enough reason to change my opinion to ads are actually good. I'm not sorry. This has nothing to do with Sync or this person in particular.
It's just the ad driven business model as a whole.
I am now very sure you are young and naive.
"Guy needs money" ... for the time invested in providing something that is optional and you are free not to use.
You don't like apps with ads then don't
I give a simple personal opinion that ads are bad and people start losing their minds. You are arguing with my opinion like you can persuade me that ads are good as objective fact. You can view as many ads as you wish, but that isn't going to change how I feel about it.
Including Sync for Lemmy who seems to have completely missed the point of getting the hell away from Reddit.
If there is one reason to support ads, only one reason, is for using Sync for Lemmy.
What allows this particular piece of software to implement an egregious dark pattern and have it be ok?
Because although it is in a very early state compared with Sync for Reddit it is also a great product.
I use Sync for Lemmy, Voyager and Summit and overall I think Summit is a better client as of now, but Sync doesn't fall too far away.
What dark pattern for real lol, we users asked for it, the dev didn't even care nor know about Lemmy if it wasn't for us, he listened and now he is present around here with a very competent client.
Would the world be better for you if Sync ceased to exist LMAO.
Anything in particular I'm missing with sync?
Well, the latest version fixed the crash that I was having (pressing the three dots upper right when I was inside a post) so that's good!
I have some ideas in mind that Sync could do better, some of these are compared with Summit or other clients, or even Lemmy backend lol (be aware that probably some of these ideas are fixable for example using another view type, I couldn't tell because I always use "slides views" or it could be that I'm missing it because Sync already has tons of features lol):
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The instance name doesn't appear next to the community name when you are inside a post (it is only visible on the feed), I think the same behavior occurs with the instance name for the username's poster, I think it is important to distinguish all the time who we are referring to.
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Summit supports a limited version of "multisubreddits" even when I find it awesome that Summit's dev added this, I feel the better way would be to wait and implement it when Lemmy has this built inside its backend... Although I'm pretty sure Lemmy has a lot of more stuff to worry about currently lol.
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I don't know if it is only me and I consume a whole lot more of content with Lemmy than Reddit, but with Sync for Reddit whenever I wiped read posts I didn't need to care about this again, at least in the current session, with Sync for Lemmy I am constantly hiding read posts and I even get a prompt saying all posts cleared from 1st, 2nds, 3rds pages etc. I think it would be nice if we could increase the fetching of new posts, so the hiding feature works better, we already see duplicated content here because of the way Lemmy works compared to Reddit, so that's maybe why I end up cleaning more posts than in the other site.
Indeed the only way I can use Lemmy is having the show read posts option disabled within the Lemmy web settings, note, all the other Lemmy clients I have tried suffer from a similar issue like this... Maybe except Connect for Lemmy, which has a similar approach to the Lemmy way of hiding such read posts, but client side like all the others (no hide read posts option/button, they hide automatically, so I kinda never compare it with others).
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Which leads me to the next point, it would be nice to have a way to manage your Lemmy web's settings within Sync for a Lemmy, this is possible from some clients like Summit and Jerboa.
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I think all clients suffer from this because Lemmy works this way, but IMO if you are using the Lemmy option to hide read posts, it shouldn't hide your own posts, they should be accessible all the time when you navigate to your profile so if Sync could have a way to whitelist this it would be awesome.
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The new way to surf through instances is awesome, and I don't recall other clients to have it, I could be wrong, but I think it would be better if it did fetch locally the instances that are cached within your instance, or the ones you are subscribed to, instead of getting the banner to load locally, I suppose there is a reason why you implemented it that way though.
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I'd like the legacy option to open in another window stuff to be more supported Settings shortcut: Post options > Long press cards to open comments in the background
Now that we can browse instances (which doesn't work with) this would be great and well this feature is very limited because it only works with two kinds of views types, I don't know why this is legacy, but I am using this very often.
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This occurred to me with Sync for Reddit too, when writing a post, or a comment or anything that involves the keyboard and changing to another app or minimizing Sync when re opening it it would always dismiss the keyboard, I find this behavior not be the same with other clients, it is only a tiny annoyance to me 😅
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I don't know why Sync doesn't show negative numbers (downvotes), only "0" it would have be fun to see the real votes for the Reddit AMAs lol
Those are my ideas, I think I'm not missing anything else, but as you can see not all these problems are Sync for Lemmy only, but it for sure would be awesome to have this working with this client.
Oh, and finally I gotta ask, how the heck did you manage to make Sync for Lemmy and Reddit to stick for so long in the RAM? I was using a custom ROM that handled my 6 GBs of RAM like if it was only 1 GB lol, and Sync would stay in the background like a champ, when all the others apps would refresh a lot, it was a true nightmare to browse Lemmy without Sync because of this feature that I never see mentioned, currently I ditched such a custom ROM and the new one handles this better, Sync still working superbly ofc, indeed when I used Boost for Reddit in MIUI I needed to pin the app so MIUI would never kill it (which is a neat feature if you ask me), this wasn't even necessary with Sync for Reddit even when MIUI is known to have a deficient RAM management.
Greetings mate!
Well, the latest version fixed the crash that I was having (pressing the three dots upper right when I was inside a post) so that’s good!
That was actually caused by using old import files.
I've made a ticket for the instance issue: https://github.com/laurencedawson/sync-for-lemmy/issues/421
re: "multi communities" I too think its best to wait for a proper lemmy solution here. The only other way I can think to do it is to manually call the posts api n times for each community. Its not going to be a good experiene.
re: hiding, the solution sync has now isn't the best but I'm waiting for this to also be added on lemmy
re: web settings: there's an open ticket for this and I've just marked it as high priority. I'll try to get that added for the next release.
re: long pressing: there's an open ticket for this too
re: negative #s: I'm pretty sure sync displays negative scores unless I'm missing something here?
re: low ram usage: I try to make things myself, don't rely on libs and still use java!
So tl;dr most of your points are being tracked as open issues. I've prioritised a few and hopefully they'll be included for the next release.
Thanks for the detailed reply!
That was actually caused by using old import files.
I should have known... I suspected about it though.
re: "multi communities" I too think its best to wait for a proper lemmy solution here. The only other way I can think to do it is to manually call the posts api n times for each community. Its not going to be a good experiene.
Yeah, I also think it would not be the best experience... I only mentioned it because Summit has it and Lemmy needs to fix lots of more stuff first before adding new features.
re: hiding, the solution sync has now isn't the best but I'm waiting for this to also be added on lemmy
I think it is not the same that I meant? I mean I don't want to hide them entirely as you can with Reddit, I only hide read posts per session based (or that is what I want to accomplish), so what I meant was to be able to do this without hitting the hide read posts button too much.
It is very handy to handle all this client side because a simple refresh would bring back all those read posts hence you can see updates of such posts or whatever, as I'm using Lemmy implementation for hiding the read posts so I'm missing on that.
re: negative #s: I'm pretty sure sync displays negative scores unless I'm missing something here?
Hmm, it works for me with comments for sure, but posts all they stay at 0 votes, never -x
re: low ram usage: I try to make things myself, don't rely on libs and still use java!
Should I interpret this as java being very efficient? 😅
Thanks for the detailed reply!
Thanks for your feedback to my feedback dude! You are a pro!
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The amount the world would be better if Syncs ads didn't exist would be negligibly minuscule to be sure, but it would be better. Every time someone was displayed an ad it made the world just a tiny bit worse. Even if it is the equivalent of a grain of sand on the beach. Perhaps overall there was a net positive, but my only point is that ads are bad and only doing it a little bit doesn't mean it is good.
Like killing one person to save 10 doesn't mean killing one person was good in of itself. The stakes are obviously quite low in the case of ads in this particular piece of software, but I still don't agree with it on principle. If all ads on the internet were eliminated then the whole experience would be greatly improved.
Every time someone was displayed an ad it made the world just a tiny bit worse
By what metric?
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We have different reasons for getting the hell away from reddit. I came to lemmy because reddit killed sync. I paid like $3 for Sync in 2014 and used it every day until Reddit killed it without seeing a single ad. So, not only do I disagree with Sync for Lemmy missing the point of getting away with reddit, but I also disagree with the notion that sink for Lemmy is in any way bad for having an ad - supported tier when you can pay a negligible amount of money ( $20 in 2023 ) and never see an ad again for the entire lifetime of the app.
Are there ads on Sync? I've been using it exclusively for the last week or so and haven't seen a single one.
I've been using Sync for Lemmy since it was first released and I still haven't seen an ad. I'm pretty sure it's a bug.
Bad content feels much much worse to me. E.g it is so infuriating to see those fake prank videos with tons of likes and positive comments. It kills my hope in humanity every time... At least an ad could be for some interesting legit product. 🫠
Jerobi is great.
Pretty much all the Lemmy clients for Android are great, and I think the iOS clients are very competent too.
Sync is garbage. I've tried every Lemmy app and settled on Voyager. It's no Relay but it's one of the most developed Lemmy apps available.
(I'm still upset that Relay's developer decided to play along with Spez's new rules and start charging users for API access. It was such a good app and I'll miss it dearly)
AFAIK pretty much all the lemmy apps are decent. There's no reason to bash on any of them just because it's not your preference