This is an opportunity for any users, server admins, or interested third parties to ask anything they’d like to @[email protected] and I about Lemmy. This includes its development and future, as well as wider issues relevant to the social media landscape today.
Note: This will be the thread tmrw, so you can use this thread to ask and vote on questions beforehand.
What’s your opinion on app developers making Lemmy clients with tracker-infused ads on their free version? Is it something you ever anticipated when you were first developing Lemmy?
EDIT: Also a similar one, what about instances potentially deciding to display ads out of nowhere? Could defederation be a tool here to discourage that?
I’m personally a hard copyleft developer, so I’d prefer that people making apps and tools for the lemmy eco-system, open source them, to benefit the community as a whole. Nearly all lemmy projects have adopted that standard, and are using the GPL and other hard copy-left licenses, and sharing their code freely with the community.
One example: various devs of lemmy apps have asked me how we build comment trees. Because lemmy’s source code is open, I was able to share the exact code from lemmy-ui (typescript) and jerboa (kotlin). This is not something closed source developers are able / willing to share.
So I continue to recommend that developers heed calls to open source their applications. I developed my ThumbKey android keyboard, specifically because my requests to the MessageEase developers to open-source their codebase, after development had stopped, went unheeded for years.
Side note, but I’ve seen a lot of the discourse around Sync confuse FOSS, with making money. Of course developers deserve to get paid for their labor time! The thing is, FOSS makes no demands on how you monetize your software: “free as in freedom, not free as in beer”, is the saying. So its entirely possible to open source your app, and still charge for it if you like. And If someone wants your app for free (say via an unlocked APK), they’ll get it, whether its closed source, or not.
And yes, if an instance decided to insert ads, or becomes full of blog/cryptospam, I’d def recommend other instances defederate from them. I’d rather not lemmy become the ad-machine that other social media has become.
I definitely didnt expect it, nor did I expect that there would suddenly be more than a dozen different apps. But its not a problem, the more choices users have the better. Those who like such clients can use them, thout it affecting anyone else. Plus monetization of apps could potentially help to fund development of Lemmy itself.
For instances with ads its pretty much the same, more choice for users. But I really doubt that model can have any success considering how many free instances are around which are run by volunteers. Defederation should be unnecessary assuming that ads are only shown to local users.