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/
YSK that, in general, you should only ever use Android apps from F-Droid unless you’ve got a very good justification for doing otherwise. That’s especially true for generic/basic utility apps like calculators, calendars, and file managers, classic games like solitaire or tetris, and Lemmy clients.
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AntennaPod is like 10x better than pocketcasts. Anytime someone asks for a podcast app, Foss or not, Antennapod is the first one brought up.
This is completely natural common sense for you and me, but to other people its alien to live with the “guilty until proven innocent” mindset that needs to be applied to software.
What about connect?
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Connect dev here. We have 0 trackers of any kind.
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They gonna know all the weird porn I look at on here. Hope advertisers need that info
This is definitely not a healthy dismissal of privacy violating behavior.
Especially in this day and age where it’s being increasingly weaponized.
It’s just hard to worry about some app tells Amazon what I like so they can sell me one brand of socks over another brand of socks, when I got a whole real life going on with bills, wife, kids, work, home maintenance, health, love, stress, ups, downs.
I do absolutely nothing if consequence on social media. If they wanna train their Algo on my lemmy habits God speed brother. I’m busy enough just trying to exist into next week.
I’m grateful to those who can fight the fight but for 99.99% of the population we cant participate in the fight with you.
[email protected] is great.
Jerboa is better apps
I use Sync. Does it track my data too?
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.
Judging by the fact that the dev hasn’t bothered to do anything with it in months, I doubt that it matters.
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.
ive been on Voyager and i like it very much. is there a known better option, or my first choice was a solid? thanks
Thank you! Saved and noticed you mention Openvibe on the list. It’s a real great app. Some of the others I’m gonna give a try
I personnaly don’t use OpenVibe as I tend to avoid proprietary software on personnal device but I like the idea of having multiple protocoles or services in one feed.
I think nostr has some amazing feature and it’s something really interesting to see evolving but the fediverse has a much bigger and diverse user-base which is important to me. Ditto is making the two bridgeable so I think it’s a bright future for distributed social networks (not social media :D)
I always come back to voyager
No, Voyager is a very solid choice, and def the best option available ATM
Thank you O/
is there any way to get display names/pfps/etc on Voyager? I keep trying to switch away to an app that has those features but something about Voyagers simplicity just keeps me hooked.
no, because the dev thinks display names are actively harmful and should be removed from lemmy. they support replacing display names with flairs like reddit. I think their post is thoughtful, but I don’t agree that display names are all that malicious.
that’s really insightful, I agree with your view. Thanks for sharing!
You can do a one time purchase to remove the ads and tracking you know, monetising an app without ads is hard.
As a free alternative, it is unfortunately cluttered with ads and tracking features.
Moreover, it employs a predatory strategy by removing these inconveniences only if users opt to pay, despite the existence of equally effective free alternatives.
This approach can confuse (especially new) users, potentially leading them to choose a less favorable option due to lack of awareness.
It’s pretty obvious, nothing is secret here. This strategy has been 1000% standard for like 20 years now.
“predatory”. You are really stretching it. A full screen message is displayed on first launch explaining the options.
For sure, it’s worth letting people know if they aren’t aware. It’s been a while since I installed boost, but I remember there being very clear messages about the ads and tracking, explaining it was to compensate the developer for the time he spent converting the reddit client to lemmy, and with the option of a one time fee to completely avoid trackers and ads.
While I love it when things are truly FOSS, I understand that I pay my barber and my plumber for their time, and I don’t have a problem paying a one-off fee to buy software I want. What is exploitative are many subscription models, and all software that takes your money AND still monetises you (looking at you microsoft).
It’s good to make people aware of genuinely free alternatives. But I used jerboa, voyager and a few other lemmy clients and I’m much happier with Boost and it was worth every cent.
As long as you are in the know and knowingly know what you are paying for it’s all good.
I personally wouldn’t because supporting them (by using or paying) will bump them up on App-store popularity lists when you search for “Lemmy” and that would only keep misleading more unaware people.
You’re completely free to support the apps and developers you prefer, but I don’t think I understand what you mean by “keep misleading more unaware people”? The play store listing for Boost for Lemmy says “Contains ads.” and “In-app purchases” in multiple places (for one, it’s the the third line after the name and developer). Its really not misleading anyone. Do you have examples of Boost or the developer claiming it is ad free or FOSS? Or do you mean something else?
I don’t approve of predatory practices, so if you can provide any evidence I would be keen to change my 5 star review and stop using the app.
Lol, it’s not like they have a monopoly (a big base sure).
What they do is transparent, they let you know upfront, and the price for the app it low.
I’m not saying I like that model, so I don’t use Boost, but this is far from megacorp strategy.
I don’t like them because of the (ad) monetisation with the big corpos, but that’s just me going ‘eww’, not me looking at Boost holding a gun to users saying this is the only way to interact with Lemmy.
(I go much more ‘ewwwww’ when I have to install an apk from Google store, via eg Aurora Store)
Also long live the (un??)dead Eternity, rofl.
Also, always use open sauce repos.
I mean if a free software that is funded via ads using tracking for their ads (a required for ad networks after all) is “confusing” to users, I honestly don’t know what to say. 🤷
Also what would be that less favorable option? Paying a dev? What a horrible fate indeed. 😅
You’re not wrong but… gestures broadly at the other available apps that don’t do stuff like this
It would also take some huge scandal before voyager ceases to be the absolute king of lemmy apps.
Performance alone i have yet to see anything get close.
Ceases*
You’re being downvoted for providing true information that disputes sensationalism. This place is truly fucking weird
I get that lemmy userbase in general dislikes ads, i dislike ads too but not every dev can go without it on their projects. There has to be some income from somewhere after all.
You can serve ads to your users without being Big Brother and selling users data to data brokers… Unfortunately it doesn’t seems to generate enough revenue anymore :'(
Lol, dude got aa much upvotes as u
When I posted that the comment I was replying to was sitting at
-13Goes to show that the first people to vote on stuff don’t represent the community as a whole
it probably only changed because Rogue made that comment
just like on Reddit, there’s a lot of sheeple here that downvote a comment just because it’s already being downvoted
Do you get a tracker-free software version, or just an ad-free experience?
The Dev confirmed that the trackers which are part of the ads plugin are not loaded when purchasing the app.
I’ve seen this kind of post about boost several times now. It’s just sad that people are just maliciously uninformed. It made me want to support the dev even more. Paying for the ad free version now.
-complains about people being uniformed.
-Does nothing to inform them.
Because other users in this thread have already given the relevant info.
I love how this post just contributed to more people paying for the paid version lol
I also just paid for no ads to support
i mean, it’s just ads. you’re blowing this way out of proportion just because of some unintrusive ads.
devs gotta eat. if you prefer FOSS, that’s great! i love FOSS software too! but boost is like home to me, even with the ads.
I like the dissent towards ads. Pushes more folks to FOSS.
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.
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.
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.
Stop using boost ages ago. The lack of updates makes the app
unusablehardly usable anyway.News to me. Boost is not only extremely usable, it’s more so than the others I tried, which was basically all the android apps.
I have tried most of the android apps there which haven’t been abandoned.
Also, not updating frequently isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I don’t see bugginess and the only feature I actually want but don’t have is spoiler formatting.
In the end, the other apps feel either glitchy, too complicated, or ugly. Sync for example. If the configuration UI was way simpler, I’d probably have used it. But it wasn’t and I had to dick around with settings a lot in various menus to get it about 95% as nice as boost. Why not just use the one with sane defaults? I’m good with giving $4 for software I like and use daily.
I hope you have donated to your lemmy instance too.
I’m not sure why you’re bringing that up, but I have been donating.
Cool just reminding. Insance is more important.
On join-lemmy there is small warning for every closed source app
I remembered Boost from the good old days a while back and am using it alongside voyager. It’s not as great as I remembered, so I’ll probably stick with Voyager. My home network keeps me safe of ads though 😉
Nice, I’m on the same boat. Voyager is superior to boost
