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Can we have some clarification on what "Usage Data" the app collects and shares with advertisers?
(lemmy.world)
What constitutes Usage Data. Is it sharing the posts I view, communities I subscribe to etc?
Does paying for a premium version stop this data being collected?
The ethos of the fediverse (insofar as it's completely free with no ads) won't be sustainable at scale; income for continued development and support does need to be taken into account at some point, and that goes for servers, frontends, apps, etc. Funding from donations only gets you so far. We will have to talk about it some day.
However, it is entirely too soon for ads and subscriptions. This feels openly and brazenly like talking advantage of Sync overly enthusiastic fanclub and the Sync name recognition. Get in early with a big name and start making money before any other big name apps like Boost are released.
Then maybe that's as far as we should go?
Wikipedia makes it work.
You'd be surprised to hear that wikipedia's main income is from their major benefactors like amazon, google, and other organizations. Donations from individual people make up a small portion of their income.
https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/annualreport/2020-annual-report/donors/#section-2
Another example would be lichess.org , which manages to compete with chess.com (a comercial site) and even pays the main developer a salary. All based purely on donations.
I think it can definitely work even in the long run.
Too soon, being taken advantage of?
The developer has a track record, we already know the product being delivered and the terms.
The fan base are the people who were already using Sync for Reddit.
The people who like me had used Sync for Reddit since 2017. Sync always had ads and the inherent tracking, I paid 2.69€ in Jan 2017 to remove ads and support the development.
(When In 2022 the developer added another support level where you had access to early betas, I paid again 4.99€, because I'm an early adopter and wanted to support again because I never went the subscription route)
I have also setup a monthly donation towards my Lemmy instance.
It might feel too soon because Ljdawson moves fast.
I feel like as long as your home instance can keep alive with donations then it will scale well. If your home instance starts needing a subscription or shows ads you could always migrate elsewhere. (But that's a pain I have already done that)
People have been saying some variant of "the fediverse won't work at scale if it stays free and without ads" for a decade now. And yet it keeps growing despite remaining free and without ads.
What scale is it at and what scale are we comparing it to? For Lemmy the comparison is reddit, and there is absolutely no way donations would cover the sheer cost of compute required to compete with a user base of that size.
I'm not going to bother looking into the numbers but I'm thinking all of the fediverse together doesn't even come close to that user base.
lemmy.world has frequent outages that last most of the day. It wouldn't say its exactly smooth sailing