With that price I feel like the dev has 0 faith in lemmy getting very big and feels like they need to capitalize on the currently few users to make back costs. I mean, not even an early access price considering its in beta still
With that price I feel like the dev has 0 faith in lemmy getting very big
It feels kind of the opposite to me.
Going back and checking my Google account history, I paid $1 for Sync Pro. In 2012. And was using it up until last month. In retrospect, that was far too low a price for the utility I got out of the app for literally years.
If anything, it feels like the dev has learned that lesson and has priced the lifetime option where it's actually sustainable for them if Lemmy stays around.
Ah. I agree that regional pricing needs to become more of a thing in general. That said, considering there’s a free option in this case it’s not too egregious. Just set up adblocking at the dns level?
But you can use sync for free. That’s why the dev has put options for you. If you cannot pay the ad removal, you can still support the developer by using the app but with ads
I agree. The original price for a lifetime use is maybe a bit too low. The original sync pro prices, but yearly instead, might be a solution. Not monthly. That is so messed up.
That’s very cynical point of view. This is for the Ultra version, which incurs recurring cost to the developer for providing extra features which requires running some servers on their side. I myself spent that much just for running a Lemmy server for two months. They still have one time $20 option that don’t include services that require the external servers.
Come on man, no need to make assumption when the ultra feature are listed there in the app setting. At a glance you can see the ones that are potential money sink are push notifications (money goes to firebase/Google), Google translate (money goes to Google), OCR (money goes to GPU vps providers). The original sync ultra even have restore deleted comments option, which mean they was practically mirror Reddit public dataset. At $17 per year or ~$100 lifetime, it’s very reasonable, which includes paying the dev as well.
I’d like a cheaper version that doesn’t have all those extra services that I wouldn’t use anyway but still gives me the actual app features like tagging etc instead.
And this is why I don’t mind the cost increase from old Sync.
I bought Sync Pro all the way back in 2014, and considering how long it’s been since then, plus the sub-2 month delivery time for Sync for Lemmy, I think you’ve more than earned an ultra sub from me!
Hey I just want to say thanks for the app. Used sync regularly back when I used to browse Reddit and it must’ve been the most used app on my phone for years. Sync for Lemmy feels just as good I’ll probably switch to the iap for ad free but for now I took the yearly sub just to throw you some money.
Had been waiting for this since you announced it haha.
Exactly. Suck the early adopter users dry just in case lemmy doesn’t get huge. I mean, yes there was dev time for this app, but of importing your syncreddit press into this app is any indication, it wasn’t a rewrite but merely an adaptation of API.
This is most definitely the dev seeing how much he can milk early on. Good for him if it works. I mean the app framework is amazing, don’t get me wrong. But not at these prices.
Okay, well, thanks but it’s too expensive for me. I want to support you but I can’t afford that. I would have paid up immediately if it was closer to the old costs, and have been really happy to do so. I’ve literally been waiting to do that.
For a lifetime price of 40 or 50 I'd probably have just bought it and hoped the dev eventually adds /KBin support. For 110 it's off the table for me altogether and I'm not a fan of subscriptions.
With that said, I've never used this app that I remember on Reddit, so, maybe it is worth it??? I'd probably happily consider a lifetime price of that much if Relay got ported (and basically consider it back pay for getting like 6 or 7 years out of it for like 4 bucks).
It seems like either the dev is planning on the app running forever and wanting to not make the mistake of charging a couple bucks for a forever license OR they don't expect it to last and need to get as much $ as they can up front. Either way, I wish them the best of luck. Since I'm not a Lemmy user, I won't be buying, at that price.
Yeah this feels like early adopter tax. Get your money off people who don’t blink at stuff like $100 for a beta app for a small reddit that’s literally just a front end.
Then lower the price slowly. Like I feel like there are more Lemmy apps than Reddit ones. It’s pretty gauling to charge so much and essentially take everything from server owners by putting this up front for people trying it from Reddit.
Server owners aren’t the only people who are working for free.
There are people that have made skins for Lemmy, do they get paid? Mods as well, not to mention the Lemmy devs and admins. And all of this is nothing without people posting content, are you going to pay them too?
If all one has to do to try and diminish someone asking for a price for their services here is to point out someone else on Lemmy that wants the money too, then everyone looks like a jerk.
Don’t forget, the whole reason Lemmy is so successful these past few months is because the work these devs do wasn’t appreciated on Reddit, and we all came here instead. Are you saying all these redfugees should leave and take their money to X instead?
Server owners aren’t doing this for free. They are doing it at cost. Some of them quite a bit. I genuinely can’t see how you can sincerely equate someone paying thousands of dollars a month to host the infrastructure of Lemmy itself as someone designing a CSS theme in their free time for something that wouldn’t exist without the mentioned instance owners. These aren’t the same. And this is the first form of mainstream monetization to hit Lemmy at any level past donations and it’s aggressive. Childish reply. Someone posting content is not spending a dime but them posting that cost the server hosters one.
So then donate to your server. But denigrating other people on Lemmy for offering highly anticipated services is appalling. Ask for donations in a more appropriate place. My server was swimming in donations and told us to stop donating. Devs adding to the tapestry of options on Lemmy, whether foss or not, don’t deserve to be harassed because you think people’s money should go elsewhere.
For myself I have KES, Move Comment Box To Top, Notifications Panel, and Subscriptions panel, all of which have done wonders for me. (and tagging @HipPriest)
Good question. In the past, there have been some federation issues. However, things have seemed fine for awhile now. I will admit that it's entirely possible that there are issues that I may not be aware of. I don't do any extensive testing as I'm just a regular user, and /kbin is a younger platform which tries to do something different from lemmy and mastodon. If the Collections feature interests you, I might suggest just making a kbin account to give it a test run. You can essentially have the same feed you do now thanks to federation, but with the added benefit of feeds more suited to your interests. Public Collections are also very useful for discovering similar communities across the fediverse.
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…
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.
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.
You’d be surprised to hear that wikipedia’s main income is from their major benefactors like amazon, google, and other organizations. Donations from individual people make up a small portion of their income.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
That’s true, but according to the Dev Google is cracking down on devs having two versions of an app (i.e. a basic ad-supported version and a pro ad-free version) and I believe if you want an app on the Google store it has to have to ad code in it. That last part I’m not sure if that only applies to apps that will have ads in them.
But, the dev doesn’t comply with gdpr. It’s opt-out by default what is not the case.
So to access the payment, you have to share private and personal datas. This isn’t fine at all. He should offer the option to buy without being tracked.
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.
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 www.patreon.com/coreprotect
Yeah, pretty much all Minecraft servers rely on donations to stay up and most of the ones that have an active player-base are able to stay up for years. Granted, many servers give certain perks to donors, but those perks are entirely cosmetic in many instances. Maybe what Lemmy needs is to add donor tags so that donors get a little bit of pizzazz on their names.
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.
I don’t really think gilding works with federation. Another issue is that cosmetics would need to be implemented by the majority of 3rd party apps. I take back what I said before, I’m not sure what a good way to fund instances would be.
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.
I don’t think donations and cosmetics are enshittification. Ads and pushing for infinite growth are. Absolutely would love for something else to be viable too though.
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
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.
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.
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.
Just imagine: Microsoft creating a lemmy.xbox.com and creating centralized gaming communities like !halo or !doom 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…
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.
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.
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.
I upvoted both of you because you’re both right. An ad/sub model does go against the grain, but the freedom to choose more polish in exchange for the lack of FOSS or vice versa is one of Lemmy’s greatest strengths.
How much of a redesign have you had to do for Lemmy? Have you been able to retain all the UI and presentation and mostly just rework the API and data handling code?
Awesome, thank you. Right now, not a single Lemmy app or web app supports tablets/foldables, so Sync will have a huge advantage over everything else if this feature is present at launch.
Nice phone you have there. Got to show mine to a really old Dutch lady yesterday. She was flabbergasted. Had just gotten her first iphone and had no idea what to do with it. She was really nice.
Shame we have to wait for that, but I guess if the site literally doesn't have an API yet, its not up to him. I've been using kbin more for some reason, don't even know why.
Artemis is scraping and using their own temporary API, which probably can't be expected from most devs. Once the real API is ready we'll see more kbin support.
Are you able to see what domains were blocked? Other posters have suggested that these attempts are blocked by DNS. If we could see the domains that were queried, we could have a better understanding of what’s being attempted here.
My speculation would be that we would see google owned domains, but I don’t know
It’s still misleading. It doesn’t say what information was attempted to be gathered those 28 times. It may very well have been 28 attempts to collect the same exact “Device orientation” over and over again (and it most likely is something simple like that).
It’s still not a listing of sync attempts only what google analytics is known to collect. If you bothered to count the items you’d have notice it’s 33 items listed yet only 28 attempts were made.
This seems completely over-the-top when the person is literally trying to have a discussion about something that they have admitted to not knowing much about. “Attempts” is the terminology being used by the DDG app, which explains why OP is using the same wording.
This whole thread has a weird, defensive and “reinforce my purchase” type of vibe. LJDawson has been pretty transparent about this and has worked hard on the app, so I sorta get it, but come on.
“In fact, misleading is putting it lightly.”
How about we all calm down before starting to throw personal accusations out there?
I was mostly posting to get community feedback and thoughts, so I shared what I came across. Figured people out there would know way more about this the I.
Thank you for spelling it out so clearly. I’ve seen the screenshot from DDG a few times today but I didn’t know how the underlying mechanics of it worked. Now I even notice at the top it says “known to collect:”.
Aside from this, I just spent 10 minutes removing consent for advertising/cookies/tracking/whatever for about 100 different vendors. I really hope I don’t need to do that again, ever.
Usually IP address. For other things it would have to have your permission (and if you give a Lemmy app permission for your location, well it’s on you). You could probably use an EU VPN. Though I’m not sure of their implementation, they might disregard your choices if you disconnect from VPN.
Hey, thinking about this, I wonder how these rules will work for a citizen of a country enforcing GDPR, who is on vacation to a country that doesn’t enforce GDPR.
Well, if you’re wondering of how it should be according to GDPR, you should still have the same protections - they are for citizens of EU anywhere in the world and for all people who are currently in the EU, regardless of citizenship. In practice I’d say those that take it seriously will have a cookie on you (if you’ve already visited) that flags you as being from EU. Those who try to fuck with GDPR will pretend they don’t know you’re from EU.
I was prompted to consent to some stuff, which I unchecked. Then there was a “vendor preferences” button, where they were basically saying “ok, even if you don’t consent, maybe you still wanna give them access if they have a legitimate interest”. So since I have also a legitimate interest in not giving my data to shady fucking companies, I spent the next 10 minutes removing ticks from boxes basically, because fuck giving me a choice to “uncheck all”, that would make it too easy to opt out.
Edit: and then to make it even more fun, I found a button somewhere in settings where I could remove my consent for gdpr-related reasons. So I clicked it. You wanna guess what it did? If you’re guessing it removed my consent, sorry - it actually removed my “lack of consent” - that is to say, it reset the settings and prompted me to uncheck everything again. Cool beans.
Kbinaut definitely rolls off the tongue better than Kbinite for me too. The latter feels a little too nasally. Then again Kbinaut sounds a little too Chuuni like it's taking taking itself toonseriously... I definitely still like it more though.
Knites. Kbinites. Knite time is the right time...
Suck on these Knauts.
Ks are silent in both unless you say the whole thing. K-bin-night. K-bin-naught.
I don’t use sync but a quick look at the authors profile shows he updated the app a month ago.
But yeah, before that there was a four month gap in communication. I agree if you’re going to charge money for something you really need to supply customer support as well.
The android app hasn’t seen an update since Lemmy .19 which we’re now on .19.3. That was back in November of 2023. LJ hasn’t made a Lemmy post in over 2 months. If this was FOSS software I wouldn’t be complaining, but Sync has pricey features that carry with it an obligation of better support/communication with your users.
In his defense he put in hella hours to get it where it is. I agree he should give more feedback though. He was MIA when someone pinged him in the discord about the breaking changes of 19 and he chimed in and updated it. I was active in the discord and was in the closed beta. He did a LOT of work around the clock. Here’s to hoping he comes back with more frequent (even if minor) updates.
Yeah, that’s typical of him. He went dormant for a long time during the first major version of Sync for Reddit, accumulating some quite critical bugs. But suddenly he came back with a new look of Reddit Sync, full of features, impressed me so much that I just let go of the past.
My hunch is, he would (try to) come out with the best app, and then move on to something (that we don’t know) so that he can support his life. Sync for lemmy is not enough to economically gain the critical mass for him to do that fulltime. But once awhile, he’ll be back to fix some critical bugs like what he did about a month ago for v0.19.
Yes he should do more and add more features. I myself only encounter non-critical bugs and don’t use Sync for mod, so I am still be satisfied with its current condition. Others surely have different requirements.
And that was fine when you paid $3 for a lifetime unlock, but the big justification behind the massively increased prices was that he would be working on it full time, and he has not held up his end of that bargain
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