I’m on thunder for the amazing design, ik it’s slow but I’m used to it cos of my crap internet
Jebora for the Win!
Yeah, because why should app developers get paid, right? They should all code for free at their local public library. Maybe live in a big ceramic jar like Diogenes.
“Free” as in “freedom”, not price. There’s nothing stopping somebody from making money on FOSS.
Goddam Richard Stallman really screwed the PR up on that one with the “free” thing.
When you figure out how to make a living writing FOSS let me know
There’s literally millions of people doing it.
I wouldn’t sweat it too much, The fact that someone could make money on this gets in the way of their narrative.
I don’t really mind that sync is closed source you should be able to have the freedom to use whatever you want and all it is is more choice but I’ll be damned if I’m going to use it.
Like who? Making an actual living I mean, not just collecting small donations to ‘buy them a coffee’ or whatever.
Not saying you’re wrong, but some examples would be welcome.
Edit: Down voting me for asking a question, lol. Way to demonstrate your dedication to that free and open philosophy you apparently advocate for, folks.
Blender, Wikipedia, Linux, RedHat and even the project you’re using right now: Lemmy
There actually are a lot of people making a living out of making open source projects
Ill admit im not very familiar with blender, linux, or redhat, so ill look into those – thank you.
My understanding is that nobody owns lemmy, rather people own the instances that make up lemmy. Which is definitely in the spirit of FOSS, but based on my understanding (happy to be proven wrong) I dont think its accurate to say the creators of Lemmy are making a living from it. You can donate to the admins of the instances you use, I suppose.
Likewise, isn’t the main source of income for Wikipedia donations? They ask me for one every time I’m on the site.
So other than semantics, what’s really the difference in making a donation to a service like Wikipedia, and paying for Sync? You can think of paying to remove ads as a donation if that helps, but the fact remains that lemmy is already available for free, and is much smaller than organizations like Wikipedia or Linux. Dude has got to eat.
Nope. The devs make a living out of it. They work on Lemmy full time. They are sponsored by NLnet and are paid for every feature they implement
Compleatly forgot to answer your other quesntion:
Yes the main income is donations. The difference is that you don’t need to pay if you can’t afford it and people who donate are generally paying more on average. The huge difference is that everyone has access to everything without paying.
Imagine what would happen if you would have to pay to use Wikipedia: nobody would use it. The content is made by users and if they would have made it a paid encyclopedia it wouldn’t have any users.
Not writing, but building:
https://www.tindie.com/stores/bmoreautomation/
Open source hardware is a thing too. It’s not many sales now but I’m still in the prototyping phase and actively changing things.
And companies think free in open source as in free labor.
The F in FOSS stands for free, IIRC. The ability to access, use, share the code, etc. has more to do with the open source part of the acronym. I haven’t really seen anyone complain about Sync being closed sourced so far… Just that you have to pay not to see ads.
Ive only ever seen FOSS developers get support through donations. Which is nice and all, but likely not enough for an independent developer like ljdawson to survive on alone.
Dont get me wrong, I like FOSS apps too, but the experience almost always suffers to some degree; its easy to see why. I just don’t get why Sync is being singled out like some kind of evil tech monopoly lately. As far as I can tell, its just an individual developer who released a great app for free (yes with ads, you’re the product, blah blah blah) with an optional lifetime payment to disable ads completely.
Blender enters the chat
Free refers to freedom, not price. No part of “FOSS” has anything to do with money or price.
Well then what’s the issue? Because every complaint I’ve seen so far has been about the optional monetary facet.
I think people are complaining about ads because ads imply tracking. I don’t know, I use Jerboa because I value the four freedoms, I’m not out here protesting non-free apps because the free apps work well enough for me.
AFAIK the way ad revenue works is dependent on trackers. Paying to remove ads on Sync also removes all trackers according to many people who have tested it; still seems to come down to not wanting to pay the developer.
Which is fine, of course. I just think framing the app as sketchy or something is completely misguided.
Are Sync Free and Sync Paid Edition separate apps? Because if not, you still have some ad publishers framework on your phone and running. I’d guess it’s Google, which means play services are required. That’s a big no-go for degoogled Linux users.
I suspect you’d hear a lot fewer complaints about paying the developer if the software were open source
People willingly donate to FOSS projects all the time. Hell, some devs even have a problem with people constantly wanting to donate when they explicitly can’t/won’t accept donations
You can have both!
In my experience you can have:
- Good app that is free with ads,
- Good app that is paid without ads,
- Shit to mediocre app that is free without ads.
I’ve tried many alternatives, but so far the intuitiveness and beautiful UX of Sync stand apart from the competition for me. I respect FOSS apps, and even prefer them in some cases. But let’s not pretend that its the best approach for every developer, or that anyone who releases a non-FOSS app is automatically greedy or sketchy.
I’ve tried a few of the other apps, and didn’t like them that much. Sync is the first one I actually liked. Not sure if I want to pay for it, though
Wefwef/voyager all the way Ü
Voyager has exceeded all of my expectations, it’s great!
Same here.
Sync had served me well on reddit. I don’t pay for Sync. Who audits open source apps?
Who audits niche closed source apps like Sync?
No one really, for small projects. But am advantage is if the development turns for the worst then anybody that’s capable can fork it and go on another direction.
Everybody theoretically. Nobody realistically
There’s always that one other guy that looks briefly at the code for the small chance to point fingers at some unethical, malicious or dangerous practices.
It depends on the project. If its a big project like Linux kernel everyone is taking a look at it
I support open sauce btw
Don’t worry voyager I’ll never leave you and captain Janeway
Don’t worry voyager I’ll never leave you and captain Janeway
There’s coffee in that fediverse
I installed both Sync and Infinity on the same day and I’ve mostly used Infinity since, I just don’t get the fuss about Sync, I think it’s only nostalgia from its Reddit users tbh (I used Boost for Reddit fwiw).
Product is king.
Inertia is also in play.
Sync for Lemmy is built by the same guy that built sync for Reddit. Built using seemingly a lot of the same code.
I bounced between all the open source apps and have started using sync for Lemmy because it’s familiar and it works. It also seems to be much faster than the others, maybe due to more aggressive caching/prefetching? Or that could be a placebo effect.
I was always having weird issues with jebora and the rest of them, and was not a fan of Voyager’s interface.
I might try connect, jebora, etc again a bit later. Might also purchase the one time and remove for sync, might donate to Lemmy instances, etc.
For now I’m just glad to have a familiar interface.
What’s important is Lemmy getting adopted doesn’t matter what app people choose.
We have great apps with PWA as Voyager or old Reddit theme with MLMYM.
Never want to use a censored social agregator as Reddit.
Just an FYI for those who aren’t aware, a native Voyager app is available via TestFlight, and it’s very similar to Apollo.
Also already submitted to Playstore , waiting for approval.
I have Sync and Thunder for now. I love thunder for the Flutter, but sync just works perfectly.
Maybe they’ll catch up someday, but I’m okay paying for software now and then.
I tried Sync, but Thunder has stolen my heart. Really happy with it and the development.
Wrong meme format if Sync is the one profiling you and the other apps are FOSS.
Google’s ad service is the thing that’s profiling you. Sync dgaf.
The way I see it, it fits very well: the hype surrounding Sync has also really seduced me. But the FOSS apps keep pulling me in a different direction. Just now I was thinking, I’ll just stay with Sync until Boost comes.
Now I am writing this message from Infinity.
Sure, if those other apps worked for me. But they didn’t. Feeds wouldn’t refresh. Local would show. And comments wouldn’t post.
Don’t let anyone pressure you into trying (or not trying) different apps if you have one you like. Sync happens to be the one that resonated with me the most, but other people won’t feel the same.
