Appreciation post for Liftoff not collecting user data or injecting ads.

I was looking forward to trying Sync today now that it's live, but my enthusiasm was immediately dampened after seeing the "Data Safety" section on the Google Play store.

Liftoff has been great, and want to say thanks for making an awesome app. This will continue to be my daily driver.

Edit: for clarity, because the post got way bigger than I expected.

Sync looks like a fantastic app, and the dev/s should charge whatever they feel is fair for their efforts, even if that's through the usual ads + ad tracking.

My intent was just to post here in /c/Liftoff to thank the Liftoff devs for managing to somehow offer an awesome app without any of that.

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327 comments

All I've learned from today's drama is some of you people really love apps. People getting enraged over which apps people are using..
Lemmy really seems to attract even more terminally online people
- I mean a lot of the people on here seem a bit more on the technical side, so it'd make sense imo
  
  You'd think that, but so many of these users complaining don't understand how ad serving works. They're acting like this is some outrageous conspiracy to gather user data by the dev himself, or are being willfully ignorant about the proof that none of ad tracking SDK even loads when you use either the one time removal or the subscription.
  I really thought that most of the early adopter crowd for a federated service like this would be at least mildly technical. But no, that's a stupid assumption in hind sight.
  
  I honestly didn't know this and I'd consider myself pretty technical, just not very familiar with serving ads. This is really cool, how'd u learn this?
  
  Right, and that's totally fair. But one might expect a more tech savvy userbase to at least try and understand what's going on or being said by other users. Instead, there's just a lot of parroting going on, which is disappointing and also kinda needlessly harmful to the app's / dev's reputation among the users here.
  If you used the DuckDuckGo browser, it can act as a fake "VPN" to intercept and block tracking requests from other apps on your phone. Multiple users have shown in the comments of a bunch of different threads that none of the tracking links are firing off when you load / use the app if you've already paid for either the one-time support or the subscription model.
  
  Often times people on the internet think they are more techy or correct than they are. The other issue is this makes other users feel like the are actually less techy but the truth is an internet search can teach you a lot about how the Internet works.
  My issue with the Lemmy community is that they think FOSS some how makes things more private and secure when that is indeed not at all how privacy or security works and there is enough evidence to suggest you are not secure no matter if it's FOSS or not FOSS.
  There is also a mentality that paying for something makes it harmful or bad.
  My argument for this is, "you will bother to pirate a game like Zelda for free because you love Zelda so much but then complain about Nintendo being bad because it walls things off. Zelda however would not exist without Nintendo and paying for Zelda would pay the devs to continue making Zelda even if it also means giving Nintendo money. So your logic is play a game you love but don't contribute to that game because you hate Nintendo?"
  The same can be said about the sync drama. You want FOSS but can openly admit Sync looks nice and operates nice but you won't pay a price for something that seems better. Well the good thing is you don't have to. Sync isn't a problem because people want to pay money for an app that works. You are the problem however if you want to dictate how people use browse the web with an app of their choice.
  FOSS is great. Lemmy wouldn't be here without FOSS but Lemmy's users decreased because Reddit's downfall and the community of users that came have talked about how poor some of the FOSS Lemmy apps are. However, they love Sync and sync also brought more people to Lemmy. People who are willing to pay. People who are making your platform more well known. An app like Sync is also offering a smooth experience and introduction to Lemmy and people will pay for things that work nicely.
  
  I think your comment brings up a good point about the intersection between what the old user base of Lemmy wants (everything is foss and transparent) and the newer user base that doesn't necessarily not want that, but it isn't as much of a priority to them as it was. And with the change in the user base you see a change in opinion towards deprioiritizing what the old user base wanted.
  Dynamics like this are always so interesting, huh.
  
  That's just like your opinion man
  
  And a lot of us are only trying lemmy because of reddit killing 3rd party apps, which were great apps. Now using lemmy through infinity and it feels good
  
  That's amazing, I hope u decide to stay :)

327 comments