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?
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
Funding your project with donations is just not a realistic long-term goal. This is why so many instances fold up shop in just a couple of weeks as their servers are overloaded and no one donates money to keep it up.
Capitalism is a problem but it doesn’t mean everything has to be socialism. There can be an in-between.
I believe its possible, at least coming from the minecraft world. if the instance doesnt grow as big as lemmy.world or something then you can ask for patrons and other ways to get donations. a lot of the plugins I use for my minecraft servers are run this way and its the way i run my server, I just ask for a dollar donation if possible from my players and that covers a little bit more than what the server costs me to run. when I check some of the plugin’s patreon page they pull in about 1k-8k a month
https://www.patreon.com/coreprotectdeleted by creator
The reddit gold model didn’t work. Reddit was a VC funded start up though, so if was expected to make a lot more than just enough to keep the servers going.
I’d bet lemmy instances can get by on donations and reddit style awards. Like you say, it can be incentivized further with cosmetic rewards.
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That’s a good point. The federation part makes it trickier.
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.
