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.
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.
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.
By what metric?
Anything in particular I’m missing with sync?