Lemmy choosing not to serve ads doesn’t mean nobody else is allowed to. I have no issues with Sync serving ads at all. Heck, I wouldn’t even care if Lemmy served them. People have a right to be paid a reasonable amount for their effort
This is more relevant for Lemmy than client apps, but the problem with relying on ads is that you then become beholden to the ad-buyers.
I think that can be mitigated by operating as a non-profit that is not seeking to launch a multi-billion IPO at some point in the future, however. Decentralization is the answer to the “growth problem” that the last decade of failed tech investments has constantly run into.
Depends on what you mean by beholden to them. Unless you’re partnering directly with certain ad providers it’s pretty much plug-and-play: you can just choose to not optimize for serving ads.
Part of the purpose of moving from Reddit to Lemmy is that a for profit corporation making money off of the free content of users was considered bad. I might even say this was the main point of contention and thought that spawned the creation of Lemmy. A free open platform where the users are more in control of their own content. Adding ads back into the mix means that somebody is profiting again off of the free content of the users. On principal this goes against the purpose of Lemmy. You may as well just use Reddit as the end goal of monetizing the fediverse is basically going to end up the same.
So for Sync to not be against the spirit of Lemmy it would need to remove its free version with ads so that the only thing you are paying for is the app itself and not for the content without ads.
Sync is still just one guy so it’s not some mega corp. I don’t like ad monetization model either but with the few apps I use regularly I’ll pay to remove.
Lemmy choosing not to serve ads doesn’t mean nobody else is allowed to. I have no issues with Sync serving ads at all. Heck, I wouldn’t even care if Lemmy served them. People have a right to be paid a reasonable amount for their effort
This is more relevant for Lemmy than client apps, but the problem with relying on ads is that you then become beholden to the ad-buyers.
I think that can be mitigated by operating as a non-profit that is not seeking to launch a multi-billion IPO at some point in the future, however. Decentralization is the answer to the “growth problem” that the last decade of failed tech investments has constantly run into.
Depends on what you mean by beholden to them. Unless you’re partnering directly with certain ad providers it’s pretty much plug-and-play: you can just choose to not optimize for serving ads.
Part of the purpose of moving from Reddit to Lemmy is that a for profit corporation making money off of the free content of users was considered bad. I might even say this was the main point of contention and thought that spawned the creation of Lemmy. A free open platform where the users are more in control of their own content. Adding ads back into the mix means that somebody is profiting again off of the free content of the users. On principal this goes against the purpose of Lemmy. You may as well just use Reddit as the end goal of monetizing the fediverse is basically going to end up the same.
So for Sync to not be against the spirit of Lemmy it would need to remove its free version with ads so that the only thing you are paying for is the app itself and not for the content without ads.
Sync is still just one guy so it’s not some mega corp. I don’t like ad monetization model either but with the few apps I use regularly I’ll pay to remove.
Just don’t use the app. This isn’t rocket science.