According to the tracking scanner Exodus (can be found on F-Droid), which keeps an updated database on trackers and runs your installed app against its register, you can track what apps are tracking you and clues of how. Saw that Boost is tracking me and uninstalled it and went straight to Jerboa. Jerboa is pretty similar to good ole’ RedditIsFun-app and easy to use, so I am personally recommending it.
From F-Droid:
Exodus (Exodus show you trackers and permissions in apps installed on your device.) https://f-droid.org/packages/org.eu.exodus_privacy.exodusprivacy/
Big fan Of Sync, but idk if it has tracking
Yeah that’s why I use the duckduckgo app tracking protection
Interesting
Edit: Doesn’t work alongside VPN
if you have a VPN, check to see if they offer an option to block trackers and ads. many of them do.
I use Sync. Does it track my data too?
I’m not familiar with this interface, but it looks to me like it is saying Google was doing the tracking. Could this be tracking attempts made from a web view opened while using Sync, and not the actual Sync app itself? I want so badly to believe they are more privacy conscious than that. Love the app, been using it since it first came out for Reddit. Solo dev IIRC.
I am not either lol, and the web browser tracking you suggest is a decent possibility.
Judging by the fact that the dev hasn’t bothered to do anything with it in months, I doubt that it matters.
!thunder_app@lemmy.world is great.
My favorite app is Firefox 😉
(or alternatively: Tor - its also great, many Lemmy instances are Tor friendly)
ive been on Voyager and i like it very much. is there a known better option, or my first choice was a solid? thanks
It’s a solid option, here is a list of great fediverse clients I made on AlternativeTo if you want to discover other great options.
Thank you! Saved and noticed you mention Openvibe on the list. It’s a real great app. Some of the others I’m gonna give a try
I personnaly don’t use OpenVibe as I tend to avoid proprietary software on personnal device but I like the idea of having multiple protocoles or services in one feed.
I think nostr has some amazing feature and it’s something really interesting to see evolving but the fediverse has a much bigger and diverse user-base which is important to me. Ditto is making the two bridgeable so I think it’s a bright future for distributed social networks (not social media :D)
No, Voyager is a very solid choice, and def the best option available ATM
is there any way to get display names/pfps/etc on Voyager? I keep trying to switch away to an app that has those features but something about Voyagers simplicity just keeps me hooked.
no, because the dev thinks display names are actively harmful and should be removed from lemmy. they support replacing display names with flairs like reddit. I think their post is thoughtful, but I don’t agree that display names are all that malicious.
I always come back to voyager
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What about connect?
EDIT: The dev replied below and said there aren’t any trackers in the app. It looks like the trackers are actually from web sites that are loaded in the browser internal to the app. I changed the setting to load web pages in an external browser and the tracking notifications from the Connect app went away, so it looks like my original comment below is incorrect and Connect doesn’t have any trackers. The trackers I was picking up were from web sites with trackers being loaded in Connect. It looks like the app is fine and you should definitely use it. It’s super easy to use and looks good.
The duck duck go app tracker firewall thing their browser comes with stops trackers coming from Connect. It’s a bummer cuz I like the app but I’ve been using a web browser more and more to access lemmy.Connect dev here. We have 0 trackers of any kind.
What about “Eternity”? I love it for Lemmy and no ads
Awesome and smooth UI
YSK that, in general, you should only ever use Android apps from F-Droid unless you’ve got a very good justification for doing otherwise. That’s especially true for generic/basic utility apps like calculators, calendars, and file managers, classic games like solitaire or tetris, and Lemmy clients.
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AntennaPod is like 10x better than pocketcasts. Anytime someone asks for a podcast app, Foss or not, Antennapod is the first one brought up.
This is completely natural common sense for you and me, but to other people its alien to live with the “guilty until proven innocent” mindset that needs to be applied to software.
As the other comments are saying, this is made very clear when you launch the app for the first time that it is ad supported, and you can donate a small amount to get all tracking and ads removed.
Love the app and I want the dev to continue development so I paid for the ad free. Devs are people and need money to live too, you know this post was just sensationalized for your own clicks.
Lemmings have a huge obsession with shit being both free and adfree, youtube is the most baffling one, they refuse to pay for it, then bitch about the ads, it seems they are entitled to having VoD delivered to them anytime anywhere in the world got completely free.
Counterpoint I think there’s a lot of lemmings who put a lot of money into hosting the very server you just posted this comment on.
Not sure what that has to do with my point, but okay
For me at least, my objection with YouTube is that Google takes a cut. I’d much rather contribute an equivalent amount to some creators via patreon and adblock the site.
Also I’m not saying the host doesn’t deserve a cut, I just think that corporations like Google are a general pest that should be eradicated
So, stop using their service? That’s the best way to eradicate google
Do have any idea how difficult it is to host a video platform? The cut they take is absolutely fair.
Anyone with a cell phone can be a youtuber.
I have close to 20 years of experience in IT and I would need to spend many days to set up an alternative for myself (forget about other people) even using software already made, and it would still cost a ridiculous amount of (partially upfront) money.
My issue with that is, g didn’t have to buy yt. They chose to. They fucked it. They knew going in that yt was a money pit. They understood everything, and they still did it. The users expected a decent, not ad-riddled experience, with no paywalled features, as yt was 20 years ago. For me, when g cried ‘it’s so hard, it costs so much money’ I pulled out my tiny violin as they assfucked their users, when they realized it hurts to hemorrhage money.
That’s what you signed up for, g. You saw a lemon on the dealership lot, stated ‘I can fix that’, and then when you realized you can’t, you expect everyone else to chip in for the repair bills - by money, personal data, or both. Nah fam, that’s not how we do things round here.
They knew what it costs, it was their plan all along as with every major service.
- get a bunch of money (either from other products or VC)
- offer a free or ridiculously cheap service to attract users, losing money in the process
- explosion in the number of users
- establish yourself as the standard
- stop losing money by rising prices or implementing ads
- users put Pikachu face, they thought the free service would magically run forever
If Google hadn’t bought it, YouTube would implement ads on their own, it was just not sustainable. Google had deeper pockets, could run it losing money for longer, get an even bigger share of the market and now they are cashing in, billions per quarter.
And i am one of the people paying for it, because it is a good product. Attracts good creators by paying them better than other platforms and works well everyday, on every device.
Youtube shouldn’t be baffling to you if you pay attention. Youtube still hoards tons of data and tracking on top of its ads. And paying doesn’t stop that. Also, they removed the option to pay to remove ads but skip all the other stuff. They removed that option right at the same time they started their war against ad blockers. Combine those points with the typical enshittification and we wind up with a service that doesn’t deserve your pity.
I’d pay for Youtube if Google would guarantee to not track me. I donate to open source projects that I use, rotating every month whom I choose to donate to. I even donated to Manjaro recently even though I don’t use it any more, but it was something I had used in the past and I was poor and couldn’t donate them then. But I refuse to feel any guilt for watching Youtube for free.
Lemmings have a huge obsession with shit being both free and adfree
Not sure thats very accurate. There’s a healthy percentage who donate to instances and developers, because on open source platforms/services/software you don’t have just trust no ones selling your data for their profit and its good to support that.
If Google open sourced their clients, got rid of adverts and all tracking and stopped selling or giving away user data but charged a reasonable fee I’d happily use YouTube.
I am clearly talking about people who continue to use youtube and want to use youtube but also adfree and for free, if you stopped using YouTube all my respect for you for actually standing up for what you believe in.
Definitely a dissenting view but one I can’t help but agree with. Same applies to piracy for me. You don’t want to give Disney money? Fair enough. Very reasonable. You still “need” to watch The Mandalorian? Okay…
I don’t think that’s how most pirates, myself included, see it. It’s not about “needing” to see the mandalorian, it’s simply about wanting to see it, but if the only way to see it “legally” is to make a monthly subscription for a service that offers me no other value, offered by a company I don’t want to support, I’m not doing that. And the thing is that it doesn’t have to be this way - I happily paid for Netflix for years, before content started being fragmented. As a wise man once put it, piracy is a service problem, not a price problem.
Same with Youtube - it’s not the ads, it’s the endless amount, the annoying implementations, and non-creator-friendly practices. They’re not doing ads in order to keep the servers running - they simply need to find new ways to squeeze every cent of profit quarter after quarter, and I’m not playing that game.
This only applies to big corps though - if you pirate indie content and don’t even make a donation to the artist, you’re an ass.
I really appreciate you responding to me in good faith, thanks. I know it’s a fine line, but generally for me not liking the terms of the agreement isn’t enough for me to force my own terms. That said, the one time I’ve pirated something in the last few years was when Prime removed a show from the platform when I had 1.5 episodes of 5 seasons left to go. The idea of paying an extra 10 quid to watch maybe 1% of an otherwise ‘free’ show pissed me off haha.
So I’m not following my philosophy perfectly either. If it came to something like wanting to watch The Mandalorian from scratch though, I would wait and buy the DVD/BluRay.
I disagree with that, Piracy doesn’t cost anyone anything, it’s people using their own internet connection and hardware to share the data, I also paid way more for my Plex setup than what it would cost to pay for streaming services.
I have everything in one place, conveniently, that’s the big difference, that’s why I am willing to pay more for my own setup.
I used to pay for netflix too, but then everyone started doing their own streaming service and now you need to have like 5-6 and then every country has something different on it, it’s a mess.
Not to mention they did shit like removed a Community episode because I guess that fixed racism?
another thing is that Scrubs is one of my favorite shows, but because licensing deals expired they changed the soundtrack and the original soundtrack was a huge part of that show, so to see it in it’s original version, you have to pirate it.
YouTube is a little bit different, imo. Ads essentially carpet-bomb you on YouTube, and the money isn’t going to the people who actually create the content. If there were a reasonable number of ads, and they paid creators more, I wouldn’t have nearly as much of a problem with it as I do.
Do you think all those bytes of video data are free to host and get to you?
Did you miss the part where I said “reasonable” and “more”? I did not say that there should be no ads or that they should pay creators everything.
YouTube makes more than $350b annually, and the most liberal operating cost estimate I’ve seen (they don’t release numbers) has put their hosting and distribution costs at about $25b. They pay out $9b annually to creators. They have 122k employees making an average of $117k annually, so that’s another $13b in employee salaries (which is always the biggest cost any company shoulders). To be extremely generous, let’s assume they also spend another $40b for all the other stuff they do as a business (office space, gold for play button plaques, pizza parties for their employees, legal, etc)–to be clear, that’s more than Netflix made in total last year, so while it might be ridiculously high, it’s not ridiculously low.
That adds up to $87b in operating costs annually. To be even more unreasonably liberal here, let’s double that. $174b in operating costs on $350b revenue would be less than half of the total, leaving them them with a whopping $176,000,000,000 in profits annually.
Only about $40b of that is ads; everything else is from subscriptions, deals, etc. And, as noted before, they pay creators about $9b annually. So if they cut ads in half, and doubled their creator payout, they would reduce their total profits to $147b. If they totally eliminated ads altogether and quadrupled their creator payout, they’d still be making more than $107 billion dollars per year above operating expenses.
They can afford to ease up on the gas a little bit.
Well yes, I’m just gonna watch Youtube videos ad free, how did you know
I reported this post because it hurts the dev for no reason. Hope it gets removed but the damage is already done. People are stupid.
Don’t abuse the report system.
Your getting downvoted for an accurate statement.
This really is just redditv2. Discussion to the sidelines over vibes and feels.
If the devs say it up front then how does reporting it hurt them? It’s just accurate.
It’s being presented in such a way that makes it look like malicious/nefarious tracking is in place, when in reality it has to do with ad analytics.
It’s 2025, ad analytics ARE for malicious/nefarious purposes. Who do you think they’re selling them to, Mr. Rogers?
And if you want them gone, you can pay for the app. It’s not like you’re stuck with them.
Same! Boost is awesome and it was a no brainer paying for the ad removal
Ya… I just bought the app. It was like 6 bucks? Totally worth it since I use it all the time and I want to support the dev.
Same deal with sync.
Minus the “small amount” part.
Is it significantly bigger? I don’t remember.
The sync dev made the same app that he did for the… other site, and built up loyalty from that. I switched to it as soon as I could get my hands on it and make sure it still worked the same.
People already liked it because they already knew it. Don’t remember now what the paid version cost, but I imagine he gets a lot of loyalty from before.
I’ve only tried one other app for Lemmy though, so I can’t say much about how it compares to others.
It’s $20
Ho leeeeee
I didn’t think it was that high, even for both versions (reddit and Lemmy) combined.
Either way I’m not too upset.
OP, you suck. This has been (falsely) reported before, and every time it gets shut down as fear-mongering. I really doubt you learned of this, did any kind of source checking or just looked it up without seeing the MANY disproving replies that are always there.
I’ve seen this enough times, this exact post, to where I’m certain it’s consciously done false sensationalist crap. There are several other posts like this about other apps and services that get posted every couple of weeks/months and just like here they always get told off for their idiocy. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a group or person doing much of it, it’s the exact same every time.
What’s the explanation? AWS sounds like ad trackage.
The tracking is still a thing, it’s just transparent about selling your location and purchase history data to Amazon and the like… So that makes it OK I guess?
No sir, I don’t like it.
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Boost is the best!
Launch the Rocket! 🚀
I guess I’m just legitimately confused about how to feel about it all. Lemmy is free, signing up on an instance is free, people are posting/creating content for free, moderators are taking care of the space for free. No one’s locking in to get “fed” through the entire chain. The arguments about abandoned apps doesn’t really compute since plenty paid and advertising friendly apps go under/stop developing further as well (and the entire Lemmy eco-system is free so silly points of “capitalism better”). There’s also the crux of “Apps just replace a webpage”, they’re really not reinventing the wheel here.
But, if people prefer paid apps, if the developers want to construct the apps in that manner, have at it. I do think spreading awareness of what apps are out there is important, and how they operate (this is YSK after all). I also wouldn’t spend time in my day coming into defend organizations that want to monetize on open source community projects either.
You’re missing the part where the lemmy and instance staff needs to get fed too. Donate to your instance the same as you would buy this app. If you use a free service for many hours, and you can spare a couple bucks, then spare it.
Nothing is immune to enshitification, not even non-shitified things.
To enshitify is human (it seems).
To grow past & beyond it is to stride for greatness, for the way forward for society to evolve.
Support foss you would like to see in the future, evolving into next gens.
And no, I do not mean support with ads of the evil megacorps!! I mean support by directly sending devs coffee or whatever the nice donation button says.
I guess I’m just legitimately confused about how to feel about it all.
The freedom of Lemmy and the fediverse let’s people choose how to interact with it.
If a user is looking for a free to use , open source, ad-free experience then that’s their choice.
If others are happy to pay for an app because they prefer the experience that app provides them they can choose to do so.
I also wouldn’t spend time in my day coming into defend organizations that want to monetize on open source community projects either.
OP read that Boost may contain code used for tracking, then started spewing some conspiracy that “Boost is tracking your data for profiling and more!” without any proof or any actual research.
This isn’t a case of defending some giant corporation, it’s just stopping tedious drama before it spreads.
If you check OPs profile they’ve been spreading this for over a week. When I first saw this thread the masses were heavily upvoting the conspiracy and downvoting anyone disagreeing.
OP read that Boost may contain code used for tracking, then started spewing some conspiracy that “Boost is tracking your data for profiling and more!” without any proof or any actual research.
This has actually been on my mind for a while now. Louis Rossmann and his consequences have been a disaster for the human race. He and his ilk talk about profiling in terms so sensationalist (“data stealing”, “spying”) that any connection to reality goes out the window and people become conspiratorial and paranoid. All reasoning about why it happens gets flattened to “they’re evil” and there’s no way to actually engage with the reasons.
I think I am one of the very few people who objects the correlation between streaming services DRM and data collection Louis talks about in his video where he tries to stream Netflix from a Linux box and gets 720p. “Piracy is absolutely justified” or sth like that was the title of the video.
Aside from what everyone else has said regarding the ads: Boost is an amazing app and I don’t browse Lemmy without it!
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