Please. For the love of god, NEVER use a proprietary app to use a piece of FOSS software. I think it’s kind of sad that we have this amazing FOSS social network and people use fucking proprietary software to use it.
Open-source it a better interface then.
Until it’s as useful as at least Sync for Lemmy, people will use 3rd party proprietary apps
There are a bunch of good FOSS Lemmy clients, which I’d argue are as good as Sync or Boost (I can’t know for sure since I don’t use proprietary software, I judge by the screenshots).
Jerboa sucks, I’ll give you that. But both Voyager and Eternity are high quality clients that work amazingly well and are constantly updated. They have plenty of features and are very configurable.
I mean isn’t Lemmy licensed under the AGPL? I’m just asking because AFAIK a proprietary client is not even allowed under this license.
You couldn’t make a proprietary server. Client is fine, AGPL doesn’t apply when you are accessing the server over a public API.
Thank you, didn’t know this :)
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Indeed.
That’s silly and I’m a long time Linux user.
i use sync. there’s nothing even close to the quality of the client. (The onlt client that implements material you in a fun and usable way, sync is usable one-handed)
I had been using Liftoff for a while (before switching to Sync as soon as it came out), which i quite liked but it feels a lot worse than sync(The onlt client that implements material you in a fun and usable way, sync is usable one-handed)
Touchscreen keyboards and their consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
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I like Voyager a lot but it might be iOS only.
Voyager is on Android as well. It’s technically a webapp, so you can run it on any device that supports displaying a webpage.
Example: https://m.lemmy.world
No it is not, even though the Android app also uses that weird style
Thunder
The ads come from an ad network where there is very little visibility into what’s going to be displayed in your app. And bad people also keep managing to get their ads published even though the ad network doesn’t allow them
And it all ties into the whole targeted advertising, where they also make sure very few people get the bad ad, and tries to target people they think may be more susceptible to these kinds of tactics. Depending on the amount of interactivity allowed, the ad can even display two different things if it deems you too savvy to fall for it.
It’s basically unescapable unless you only use apps without ads, or pay for the ad-free versions.
The whole advertising industry is sketchy, more news at 10.
Pi-hole blocks ads served by these networks just fine. Never seen an ad in Boost for Lemmy or for Reddit, though I tend to use Jerboa now that I’ve gotten used to it while I was waiting for Boost for Lemmy to release.
DNS based adblocking like Pihole or Adguard limits you to receiving advertising hosted by the app provider (youtube for example) which is usually better curated than third party advertising networks and less commonly found at all.
To be truly effective you must also block DoH and DoT. The first can only be done with endpoint lists, since it is https.
Maybe in comming years, but I’ve never encountered an ad served explicitly through DoH/DoT. It’s certainly possible, just not actually in use yet.
You can also setup DoH front and back ends for pihole so traffic entering and leaving it is encrypted. When/if it becomes necessary I’ll probably look into https packet inspection using custom Root certs to force clients to use my local DoH services and block other traffic, or look into inspecting the SNI to apply blocking there; but again its just not needed yet and may not be for a long time. We’ll see. I’m sure the pihole/Adguard teams are also investigating solutions.
Hey, could you elaborate or send some lecture? I have the upstream quad9 DoH address in adguard. It’s supposed to better encrypt my traffic right? Never saw any ads or strange DNS requests.
Never heard about ads being inject though DoH or DoT, or did I misunderstood your comment?
Theoretically an app could use a custom DoH endpoint to retrieve ads instead of the standard dns provided by the system. As this uses purely https without a preceding dns request, pihole/adguard would fail to block it; but it’s just not something currently employed.
Dns adblocking blocks these 100%
Yep, also the ads don’t get initialized at all if the user buys the ad-free version (going to top all in the Lemmy Boost community should bring up the post about it). It’s relatively cheap and the dev is very active with bugs and requests. The dev is developing for the Fediverse and I’m happy to support that (as well as devs for Sync, Connect, Lemmy, etc.)
I like Boost and paid for ad-Free, but a lot of other clients should work for your needs. While they might not be privacy focussed, many are open source so you can check what is going on.
My preference goes
- Boost (not FOSS, one time payment to remove ads)
- Connect (not FOSS, ad free)
- Eternity (FOSS & ad free)
I uninstalled the other ones and haven’t kept up with them. There may be better ones out there, these are the ones I’m keeping up with
Love how the top comment is a rando saying it’s unavoidable but the dev literally says below that they fixed it.
The [exact ad from the] specific advertiser will never be seen again, so indeed the issue has been mitigated.
Other bad actors are still out there, though, hence the need for the report button the dev mentioned.
I’ve used Boost since launch and never once seen something like that happen
Same
Same but also paid for no ads. This isn’t a boost issue per se, it’s just how ads are made to look and boost free has ads.
I don’t even have ads. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Jerboah??
+1
I don’t think it shows any ads.
Of course not.
No h on the end - just Jerboa
Voyager the 🐐no 🧢
Why would you need an app when an account settings page and a web interface for posts exist? What need is that combination not meeting for you?
Yup, lemmy works fine in a browser.
Also basically no apps support mod and admin actions or do it weird.
I’ll say that DMs could be a bit better in the browser, but otherwise it’s fine.I don’t undestand the need to have an app for stuff that works just fine on browser. In my books less apps is always better. The desktop and mobile version of Lemmy on browser gets the job done perfectly and is way more polished looking aswell.
Mobile browsers suck imho. Everything has to reload all the time, no good notifications, it’s slow etc
Jerboa
I’m not so sure about clients that are specifically focused on security and privacy, however my general FOSS mobile app suggestions would be Voyager for a polished UX, or Eternity for a more native Android experience.
Both are available on GitHub and F-Droid
Eternity. It was a FOSS Reddit client before the API stuff but they became a Lemmy client.
Maybe pedantic, but it’s a totally different developer that took the Infinity for Reddit source code and forked it into Eternity for Lemmy. The Infinity dev was not interested.
I’m not sure why people insist on F-Droid, considering the F-Droid Security Issues.
I use it because, contrary to what that scare piece you linked would have the reader believe, it’s better for my needs than the alternatives.
(I’m no stranger to software development and security, by the way. I understand the pros and cons.)
that scare piece you linked would have the reader believe
So an indepth and critical analysis of something is now a “scare piece?” Ok.
thunder is awesome too
Voyager is currently many versions ahead of the one listed on F-Droid. It is still usable but you may want to get the latest version from GitHub.
If new versions don’t make it to F-Droid, they might as well not exist for me. There are only a couple of apps that I find important enough that I’ll spend time manually building/pulling/installing, and a Lemmy reader isn’t one of them. Thanks for the tip, though.
Have you considered using https://github.com/imranr98/obtainium You give it the repository of the app and it will handle checking for new versions and updating them
Part of what I value in F-Droid is the additional layer in the build/release process, because it makes tampering more likely to be detected.
It’s still nice to know a tool like obtanium exists, though. Thanks for the link.
Part of what I value in F-Droid is the additional layer in the build/release process, because it makes tampering more likely to be detected.
Barely and not really. “F-Droid can’t ensure the apps are safe. You still need to trust the upstream developers. We only do some basic check.” https://forum.f-droid.org/t/is-it-as-safe-as-it-is-from-fdroid-official-repo/15956/2
N + 1 > N
N + X - Y ? N
Except now you’re adding an additional party to trust (the -Y). So it could still be considered less secure than N.
This is exactly the reason why I don’t like F-Droid as a way to get apps. You’ll have to trust an additional party when getting your apps, and updates are often a couple days behind. I prefer to get it straight from the developer’s GitHub or Coderberg or whatever.
You’ll have to trust an additional party when getting your apps, and updates are often a couple days behind.
I know how it works, and in this case, that’s fine with me.
F-Droid has an excellent track record; better than many developers have. And I’m not addicted to having the latest versions of everything on the day they’re released. In fact, not immediately jumping on the latest versions has saved me from nasty bugs more than once.
Eternity FTW
The title is a little disingenuous. Claiming this is a property of the Boost app isn’t correct… It’s just an ad network.
I didn’t make the statement that it’s their property, I made the statement that it’s being displayed through their application.
Boost loads adds from a shitty network though. Most open source apps don’t do this stuff because nobody wants a Lemmy client to load ads; users only ever tolerate it in return for a more polished UI or whatever.
Wait, Boost has ads? I’ve literally never seen an ad.
have you installed anything like pihole or your own dns?
Nope. Standard router and DNS.
I did pay for Boost since it was a one-time payment and I have free googlebucks.
Yes, quite the concept this whole issue goes away for spending a couple bucks on something that likely gets used daily.
