I was close to it. I'm an advocate for paying for services I use. We're way too used to getting everything for free and we should be willing to pay for services we appreciate.
Which made me realise that Facebook especially I don't appreciate. So I quit instead. It had value to me once but those times are long gone.
Yeah, Google+ was such a hit thanks to its lack of users
It's like people are trying to misinterpret.
Liftoff is strictly using Lemmy's free API and for the developer 5 users or 5M users doesn't make a difference to his expenses.
The Sync developer is obviously trying to do something more ambitious.
It's great that we have FOSS apps that do a decent job but we shouldn't look down on developers who put a lot of time, effort, and money into something expecting to make a return on their investment.
I don't like data collecting either but I accept that if you want to offer a free version - it's inevitable. What I hate is when you're not able to pay for ads to go away.
But I might be biased as I'm a developer myself and would hate to put 8-9 weeks of hard work into delivering a great app and then get hate for wanting to get something in return for that work.
I think you're spot on and it applies in general to why we see a trend of subscriptions. When we all got our first smartphones, most apps were local and it didn't cost the developer more if they had 1M downloads compared to if they had 50 downloads.
I think the main issue is we don't know where Lemmy is one year from now. I have already started to see a decline in my usage because there simply isn't enough content. /c/football is virtually dead it feels like and it (or rather /r/soccer) was my number one subreddit.
What the hell, this is so impressive. I'm blown away! Did not expect this kind of experience this fast!
Pff, this has to do with people caring more about their polling numbers than the environment.
Actually saving the environment requires some hard sacrifices and it's hard to be the elected leader who tells their voters that they're going to pay more and get less.
But in non-democratic countries you're right of course.
Are you kidding me? Just checked this community for the first time in a month and this post is 15 minutes old? That's freaky timing
Because they care about one metric: time spent watching ads.
If they only show you chronological - for example - there is a risk you open the app, find that nothing has happened (or what happened is of low quality). Controlling what you see makes it easier to also ensure there's always a reason to visit the page. Leaving it all to recency or popularity or something means handing over the control of your time.
And it's always going to piss off people but the important part is what it does for the big masses (which likely is - more time spent watching ads)
Most of the aspects have already been covered but I would want to add one:
This was always the plan, it just wasn't as highly prioritised as growth.
I work as a developer at a big tech company. We (the company) had our roadmap and it was mostly about getting more users. The more users you have the day the economy turns - the better off you are (... If you manage to turn an profit).
So when the economy went to shit and we (and other tech companies) no longer can loan money for free to cover our running expenses - the priorities shift. Working towards attracting more users is only going to increase your costs at the point and you don't want to run out of money. So all roadmaps changed and cost saving efforts became the highest prio all of the sudden.
Makes a lot of sense since it's a sub for power users. The proportion of 3rd party app users is probably among the highest at Reddit
My first gig as a software developer offered Fedora23 I think it was if you wanted Linux. Would be interesting to see how much has changed but I don't really have a machine to just throw fedora on