According to the tracking scanner Exodus (can be found on F-Droid), which keeps an updated database on trackers and runs your installed app against its register, you can track what apps are tracking you and clues of how. Saw that Boost is tracking me and uninstalled it and went straight to Jerboa. Jerboa is pretty similar to good ole’ RedditIsFun-app and easy to use, so I am personally recommending it.
From F-Droid:
Exodus (Exodus show you trackers and permissions in apps installed on your device.) https://f-droid.org/packages/org.eu.exodus_privacy.exodusprivacy/
What about “Eternity”? I love it for Lemmy and no ads
Awesome and smooth UI
Eternity is good, sadly it’s rarely gets update from dev
I use Sync. Does it track my data too?
Judging by the fact that the dev hasn’t bothered to do anything with it in months, I doubt that it matters.
For what I can see, no. At least, not more than normal apps. A lot of apps comes up with the blocking tracking attempts (duckduckgo) by the company Google. Google is the only one with sync.
Edit: I have paid for the app.
I’m not familiar with this interface, but it looks to me like it is saying Google was doing the tracking. Could this be tracking attempts made from a web view opened while using Sync, and not the actual Sync app itself? I want so badly to believe they are more privacy conscious than that. Love the app, been using it since it first came out for Reddit. Solo dev IIRC.
I am not either lol, and the web browser tracking you suggest is a decent possibility.
There is a reason so many Lemmy apps are abandoned, they were free and free of advertising. Devs need to eat. I prefer the paid app model to support the devs as opposed to ads. The dev of boost has always been open about how ads work.
Boost is the best!
Launch the Rocket! 🚀
Would like to throw [email protected] in the ring as an alternative
Eternity still good
Yep it is. It’s also free with no ads and open source.
Problem is it had no updates in 6 months. I had problems with images and such. For now i am for Voyager app. Its updated regulary
Even though it’s not updated, there’s nothing wrong with it so far.
I think the images not loading issue has to do with Lemmy servers, as I see it on desktop web version all the time.
Well those problems persisted all the time on mobile for me, or some images needed to be opened in webview instead of the app.
Jerboa is very cool and works great
I guess I’m just legitimately confused about how to feel about it all. Lemmy is free, signing up on an instance is free, people are posting/creating content for free, moderators are taking care of the space for free. No one’s locking in to get “fed” through the entire chain. The arguments about abandoned apps doesn’t really compute since plenty paid and advertising friendly apps go under/stop developing further as well (and the entire Lemmy eco-system is free so silly points of “capitalism better”). There’s also the crux of “Apps just replace a webpage”, they’re really not reinventing the wheel here.
But, if people prefer paid apps, if the developers want to construct the apps in that manner, have at it. I do think spreading awareness of what apps are out there is important, and how they operate (this is YSK after all). I also wouldn’t spend time in my day coming into defend organizations that want to monetize on open source community projects either.
I guess I’m just legitimately confused about how to feel about it all.
The freedom of Lemmy and the fediverse let’s people choose how to interact with it.
If a user is looking for a free to use , open source, ad-free experience then that’s their choice.
If others are happy to pay for an app because they prefer the experience that app provides them they can choose to do so.
I also wouldn’t spend time in my day coming into defend organizations that want to monetize on open source community projects either.
OP read that Boost may contain code used for tracking, then started spewing some conspiracy that “Boost is tracking your data for profiling and more!” without any proof or any actual research.
This isn’t a case of defending some giant corporation, it’s just stopping tedious drama before it spreads.
If you check OPs profile they’ve been spreading this for over a week. When I first saw this thread the masses were heavily upvoting the conspiracy and downvoting anyone disagreeing.
OP read that Boost may contain code used for tracking, then started spewing some conspiracy that “Boost is tracking your data for profiling and more!” without any proof or any actual research.
This has actually been on my mind for a while now. Louis Rossmann and his consequences have been a disaster for the human race. He and his ilk talk about profiling in terms so sensationalist (“data stealing”, “spying”) that any connection to reality goes out the window and people become conspiratorial and paranoid. All reasoning about why it happens gets flattened to “they’re evil” and there’s no way to actually engage with the reasons.
I think I am one of the very few people who objects the correlation between streaming services DRM and data collection Louis talks about in his video where he tries to stream Netflix from a Linux box and gets 720p. “Piracy is absolutely justified” or sth like that was the title of the video.
Nothing is immune to enshitification, not even non-shitified things.
To enshitify is human (it seems).
To grow past & beyond it is to stride for greatness, for the way forward for society to evolve.
Support foss you would like to see in the future, evolving into next gens.
And no, I do not mean support with ads of the evil megacorps!! I mean support by directly sending devs coffee or whatever the nice donation button says.
You’re missing the part where the lemmy and instance staff needs to get fed too. Donate to your instance the same as you would buy this app. If you use a free service for many hours, and you can spare a couple bucks, then spare it.
God damnit, I use this app
Consider paying the one-time fee if you enjoy the experience, it will remove ads and tracking. You can also consider other client such as Voyager which is FOSS.
Oh, I paid for it from the start. Guess I’m fine then
I find it funny that one app is called Jerboa which is a local delicacy in Najd and other parts of the Arabian Peninsula.
I am personally happy with the web app.
You will only pry Boost from my phone over my cold dead hands.
I’ve not found a similar service to Exodus for iOS devices (yeah, I know, but that’s what I’ve got) but to the best of my knowledge Mlem is a pretty good alternative to Boost on apple devices, and the best user-experience I’ve so far found
Mlem is in my opinion the best open source Lemmy client for iOS. There is another amazing client named Arctic for Lemmy that has great UX but the app is proprietary. However it seems to be privacy respecting and nothing compared to Boost privacy nightmare on free tier.
Yeah there is a dialogue on first launch telling you it’s ad supported software and that you can pay a small fee to remove all ads. Your post here is old news about an old strategy and throughout the comments here you claim it’s secretive which is false.
It’s a charitable reading to say you’re uninformed. I would lean more toward you wanting people to be misinformed about Boost, because as others point out, its ad support is called out in multiple ways before you use it, but you don’t care. Instead, you choose to call this completely common and standard way of supporting an app “predatory” and “secret”, neither of which near truth. Op, is your account the alt of the Sync dev or something?
Op, is your account the alt of the Sync dev or something?
I wish that was the case. @[email protected] - the Sync dev - has been MIA for over half a year now. Which sucks, because Sync currently has a breaking bug causing it to not show posts as read, making it mostly unusable. I had to cancel my subscription for it that I was happily paying for before to support his work.
It does? I’ve never had this issue on Sync.
It happens when your home instance upgrades to a newer version of Lemmy that changed how one of the variables worked to track read posts. I’m guessing lemme.ee hasn’t upgraded yet? Sh.itjust.works upgraded something like 6 months ago and it’s been unusable ever since. I suppose I could make an account on another instance, but that’s a pain.
wow… subscription and also MIA that long!
It was pretty common for him to disappear for a while and then pop up with a whole bunch of new features. I didn’t mind that before and gladly paid the $1.50/month subscription to support his work and make Lemmy more accessible. But yeah, can’t justify it now that the app shows all links as unread.
Yeah, I remember seeing complaints about that from time to time. Sounds like it’s gotten worse.
You were happily paying it before then? He’s done this so many times. I gave up about a year ago when he made markdown work in titles, which no one asked for, and then disappeared again. Everyone who started a title with a hashtag had a giant freaking font for a heading. And spoiler markdown had never worked right. It always used the reddit style. It would even change proper Lemmy spoiler tags into reddit ones when you editted your comment.
I took the time to try out every other app at the time and settled on Thunder. It’s just as good, it’s in active development, and it’s free and open source, so it can never be abandoned like Sync is. Anyone can fork it if they had to, and keep it going.
It pisses me off so much that Lawson had the audacity to charge $20 for a broken port of Sync for Reddit and then disappear with severe open bugs for months at a time. I wish I could get my money back.
I downloaded Sync the first day he released it. It had a few bugs, but he was very active at the time and seemed to clean them up quickly. I made a post in his community about a problem with comment sorting and he resolved it the very next day!
So yeah, I glady paid for what I thought was a pretty good app (still is without the unread issue). Since then I’ve gone back to Voyager, which is ok but still has some quirks that make me miss Sync. Might give Thunder a shot.
Or just use a browser, ffs.
everything doesnt need to be an app.
especially when its nothing but a goddamn webbrowser, wrapped in an app, with less protection.
They’re not just browsers, they’re accessing the posts via an API and presenting it in a bespoke manner with purpose-built controls.
That’s good because it’s faster and lower-data than a webpage, and it’s easier and faster to use on mobile.
Not every app is just a web browser, that’s a particular kind of lazy app created by the app hype bubble like 20 years ago.
I really don’t know anything about the technicalities of apps, but you should try http://phtn.app/ on mobile, it’s UI is pretty good.
That being said if there was an app for it I would totally prefer that over a webpage in my browserI use it on desktop, despite some bugs from time to time I really enjoy the experience and slick design ! It’s still in early alpha so honestly I am impressed !
That’s very laggy for me, whereas my lemmy app, voyager, is extremely smooth.
It’s building a general purpose UI as a webpage which then has to be interpreted via your browser which then serves the UI up to you. Because this browser has to handle literally whatever is being thrown at it at all times, there is a lot of overhead and extra processes running to make it work correctly.
All of the graphics are equivalent, every line between every element, every button, every image is represented in the same data that the text is, so the phone is interpreting and rendering many times more stuff.
In contrast, a native app takes the bare text & media data and renders it in native controls, so the phone is able take a tiny amount of data and fit it into a template that renders natively on the phone. It’s doing orders of magnitude less work.
Why use a browser?
Just learn how to parse raw HTTP responses. That’s all a browser does, with less protection.
Nope, you can’t actually do that anymore since there’s SSL in the way. I tried anyway, though, just for giggles:
drath@machine:~$ telnet lemm.ee 80 Trying 2606:4700:20::681a:5f3... Connected to lemm.ee. Escape character is '^]'. GET / <html> <head><title>400 Bad Request</title></head> <body> <center><h1>400 Bad Request</h1></center> <hr><center>cloudflare</center> </body> </html> Connection closed by foreign host.Of course I can curl and wget, but that feels against the spirit of hardcore reading the raw data.
