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?
Doesn’t this ad/subscription model, go against the grain a bit? With Lemmy & the fediverse in general, being an opensource environment, which has no ads, & funded by donations, rather than a subscription model…
I don’t have an issue with a reasonable subscription, but hard pass on trackers, especially when you’re paying.
I would one time pay for this, but a subscription feels meh.
There are plenty of apps for Lemmy, that aren’t supported by ads, nor should they be, given the whole ethos of the fediverse…
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.
Funding from donations only gets you so far.
Then maybe that’s as far as we should go?
Wikipedia makes it work.
I really like Connect for Lemmy! And it’s Canadian!
Connect is really nice, as are Canadians👍🏼
No, it doesn’t. Unlike Reddit, Twitter, or Threads, Lemmy offers a variety of apps. There are so many that there is something for everyone. Even a “professional” app that finances itself with advertising or a subscription is allowed. The special thing about Lemmy is the freedom of choice.
From DuckDuckGo:
For what it’s worth, I subscribed to Ultra about an hour ago and DDG hasn’t picked up any additional tracking attempts since then. I think it may be limited entirely to Google’s ad service for the free, ad-supported tier and maybe crash diagnostics that the app gives you the option of enabling or disabling.
FWIW that page is a bit deceptive , it’s not saying it’s collecting all of that data. The only info on that page is “146 tracking attempts from Google”, which makes sense if it has Google ads.
I think that the lack of further attempts backs up what lj shared a bit ago in the Discord. That’s still a hell of a lot of tracking for folks who can’t or don’t want to pay, though.
Sure would be cool if this kind of information was provided outside of a proprietary service that not only requires a login but also you to join a specific server just to then have this be hidden by 1,500 random messages that you don’t care about. Shame there is no such place.
Holy hell. I’m glad I’m using DNS-level ad and tracker blocking. Shout out to NextDNS and RethinkDNS!
Can you explain more? Would DNS level blocking stop ads on a smart TV (for YouTube specifically) as well?
That’s a good question
Since it’s admob my guess is it’s Google analytics. Which means everything you look at or touch, but it’s probably as much for the developer so they can see how users are reacting to the app layout and designs.
The developer should move to an open source platform for analytics if this bothers users.
Aside from this, I just spent 10 minutes removing consent for advertising/cookies/tracking/whatever for about 100 different vendors. I really hope I don’t need to do that again, ever.
How did you do this?
I got to that exact screen and my excitement went from 100 to like 10. I’m back on Connect, didn’t even take Sync out for a spin.
I’ve been using DDG for tracking, and Connect had all sorts of weird tracking when I used it. Check it out with some network monitor and make sure it’s not sending back your info.
Thanks for the info. Which ones are open source and don’t track? Liftoff and Jerboa?
Jerboa seems clean so far! Haven’t tried Liftoff much as I didn’t like the UI.
Yeah, I saw this too when I went to download, and this bothers me a little bit. None of the other Lemmy apps I use collect my data.
Is this decision set in stone?
Some quick search engine magic led me here: https://levelup.gitconnected.com/filling-out-the-app-privacy-section-in-app-store-connect-for-admob-users-bca0768ad86e
Same search engine magic should come up similar results for the Amazon usage data too
The data is less about what you are personally doing and more things like which device does a user have, which country is a user from, how often do they use the app, and how often do they click on ads.
You can dig more into what admob means by usage data here: https://support.google.com/admob/answer/9263723
