Boost dev here. There should be an Ad icon on the top right to report the ad. Not sure why it is not showing in this case. I will try to block those ads in the AdMob console. Edit: Done
thanks for caring!
Awesome, thank you.
This is the stuff I come to Lemmy for. Love the quick feedback and positive approach to the situation.
Thanks, absolutely love the app btw, I’ve used the Reddit one for years and the Lemmy one is just great.
How about you remove ads entirely like other competing apps do? Until you promise that your app won’t advertise to me nor track me, I have no reason to use it over much better alternatives like Voyager that don’t invade my privacy.
I’m not a boost user, but why does boost have ads exactly? Why don’t you just ask users to buy a license a la grayjay? Make it 0.99 or less. This has a few advantages:
- You’ll make more per user than you ever will with ads
- Users won’t be tracked endlessly
- It’s good PR for the app
Also quick question, where is the source code for Boost? I can’t seem to find it
I don’t think Boost is open source, and you can pay a one time fee to permanently remove the ads
I don’t think Boost is open source
oh, so that’s why it has ads, they don’t care about their users… alright… I’m not interested in this conversation anymore
This is a bad mindset. Even though FOSS software is a good thing, but there is nothing wrong to make money from their hard work, you cannot and should not force developers to work for free if they don’t want to.
If you want free software then there are FOSS alternative options out there and nobody forces you to use Boost.
there is nothing wrong to make money from their hard work
I assume you didn’t read my parent comment or perhaps you extrapolated on my beliefs without asking. I even proposed a direct way to ask users to pay.
you cannot and should not force developers to work for free if they don’t want to.
My word, of course not! Where did you get the impression that I want that from? I would NEVER propose something like that, as it stands against everything I believe in; in fact if you read through my history on lemmy I am certain that you’re gonna find plenty of proof of that.
I stand by the original meaning of the word when I say FOSS. It does NOT mean gratis; the misuse of the term FOSS as gratis is my biggest pet peeve. I don’t care how much you charge for your software, if I like the software I will pay for it, exactly how much you’re asking, without a problem.
The F in FOSS stands for Freedom, not price. I have paid for most FOSS software I use on a regular basis and I’m a HUGE proponent of paid FOSS and I have, multiple times, asked FOSS developers that release gratis software to PLEASE open up donations; I do this constantly and I think I may even have done it here on lemmy once or twice.
If you want free software then there are FOSS options out there and nobody forces you to use Boost.
Indeed. My preferred client at the moment is the web ui on desktop and jerboa on mobile. Those are FOSS and developed by the developers of lemmy themselves (to whom I HAVE donated to). But I was thinking about switching client, which is why I asked for the code for Boost to see if it’s software I would be willing to run on my device (and pay for!).
In fact I will even go as far as to say that it is your RESPONSIBILITY as a user of FOSS applications to donate if you can.
To me if software is not FOSS it signals one thing: they are doing something they don’t want me to know about, sometimes this is acceptable (tho never preferred), but that’s the exception, not the rule.
Being able to decide what software runs on your machine should never be a point of contention. Non FOSS software is always a trade off, and for most things (including lemmy clients), it’s not one I’m willing to make, nor should you!
HOW FUCKING DARE THEY NOT WORK FOR FREE, FLAIL THEM NOW
Other people do it. They also just work for donations.
On a side note, I recommend sideloading Blokada 5 to permanently block all ads in apps.
You can download it from their website: https://blokada.org/#download (pick blokada 5)
You have to sideload it because Google banned it from their store for being too effective.
NextDNS is much easier to set up. You don’t even have to install it.
or use grapheneos if youve got a pixel
Neither boost or Grayjay are FOSS. You’ve got it all wrong.
Regarding boost, yep my bad! I did not know that when I asked that question.
As for grayjay, it’s source available, that’s fine to me, there is a difference naturally and it’s worth discussing, but I’d rather live in a world where every piece of software is source available and we discuss the merits of source availability vs pure FOSS, than in a world where understanding our software requires days or months of work looking at asm and poking it with a stick
It’s always fuckin’ Ruben breaking shit.
P.S. I want a free license and a BJ. 👍
The ads come from an ad network where there is very little visibility into what’s going to be displayed in your app. And bad people also keep managing to get their ads published even though the ad network doesn’t allow them
And it all ties into the whole targeted advertising, where they also make sure very few people get the bad ad, and tries to target people they think may be more susceptible to these kinds of tactics. Depending on the amount of interactivity allowed, the ad can even display two different things if it deems you too savvy to fall for it.
It’s basically unescapable unless you only use apps without ads, or pay for the ad-free versions.
The whole advertising industry is sketchy, more news at 10.
Pi-hole blocks ads served by these networks just fine. Never seen an ad in Boost for Lemmy or for Reddit, though I tend to use Jerboa now that I’ve gotten used to it while I was waiting for Boost for Lemmy to release.
DNS based adblocking like Pihole or Adguard limits you to receiving advertising hosted by the app provider (youtube for example) which is usually better curated than third party advertising networks and less commonly found at all.
To be truly effective you must also block DoH and DoT. The first can only be done with endpoint lists, since it is https.
Maybe in comming years, but I’ve never encountered an ad served explicitly through DoH/DoT. It’s certainly possible, just not actually in use yet.
You can also setup DoH front and back ends for pihole so traffic entering and leaving it is encrypted. When/if it becomes necessary I’ll probably look into https packet inspection using custom Root certs to force clients to use my local DoH services and block other traffic, or look into inspecting the SNI to apply blocking there; but again its just not needed yet and may not be for a long time. We’ll see. I’m sure the pihole/Adguard teams are also investigating solutions.
Hey, could you elaborate or send some lecture? I have the upstream quad9 DoH address in adguard. It’s supposed to better encrypt my traffic right? Never saw any ads or strange DNS requests.
Never heard about ads being inject though DoH or DoT, or did I misunderstood your comment?
Theoretically an app could use a custom DoH endpoint to retrieve ads instead of the standard dns provided by the system. As this uses purely https without a preceding dns request, pihole/adguard would fail to block it; but it’s just not something currently employed.
Yep, also the ads don’t get initialized at all if the user buys the ad-free version (going to top all in the Lemmy Boost community should bring up the post about it). It’s relatively cheap and the dev is very active with bugs and requests. The dev is developing for the Fediverse and I’m happy to support that (as well as devs for Sync, Connect, Lemmy, etc.)
I like Boost and paid for ad-Free, but a lot of other clients should work for your needs. While they might not be privacy focussed, many are open source so you can check what is going on.
My preference goes
- Boost (not FOSS, one time payment to remove ads)
- Connect (not FOSS, ad free)
- Eternity (FOSS & ad free)
I uninstalled the other ones and haven’t kept up with them. There may be better ones out there, these are the ones I’m keeping up with
Dns adblocking blocks these 100%
Love how the top comment is a rando saying it’s unavoidable but the dev literally says below that they fixed it.
The [exact ad from the] specific advertiser will never be seen again, so indeed the issue has been mitigated.
Other bad actors are still out there, though, hence the need for the report button the dev mentioned.
Jerboa (FOSS. Play Store + F-Droid)
Voyager (FOSS. Play Store + F-Droid + PWA + iOS App Store)
Thunder (FOSS. Play Store + IzzyOnDroid + iOS App Store)
Eternity (FOSS. Play Store + F-Droid)
edit: formatting
10/10 for Voyager, with a shout-out to Eternity too!
Eternity is great and there’s a work in progress to add multicommunity support.
Also just like Infinity enabling amoled theme makes it look a whole lot more modern.
The only thing it is missing for me is community search. It is great! Also the most customizable of the bunch in my opinion
Jerboa’s great
I need to do another round of trying everything. Currently using Liftoff and happy with it, but I should check out the alternatives anyway.
Voyager is so good! Basically a drop in replacement for Apollo.
As a user of RedReader since launch a decade+ ago, I dig Thunder. Simple, no bullshit, logical settings.
Please. For the love of god, NEVER use a proprietary app to use a piece of FOSS software. I think it’s kind of sad that we have this amazing FOSS social network and people use fucking proprietary software to use it.
i use sync. there’s nothing even close to the quality of the client. (The onlt client that implements material you in a fun and usable way, sync is usable one-handed)
I had been using Liftoff for a while (before switching to Sync as soon as it came out), which i quite liked but it feels a lot worse than sync(The onlt client that implements material you in a fun and usable way, sync is usable one-handed)
Touchscreen keyboards and their consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
Open-source it a better interface then.
Until it’s as useful as at least Sync for Lemmy, people will use 3rd party proprietary apps
I mean isn’t Lemmy licensed under the AGPL? I’m just asking because AFAIK a proprietary client is not even allowed under this license.
You couldn’t make a proprietary server. Client is fine, AGPL doesn’t apply when you are accessing the server over a public API.
Thank you, didn’t know this :)
AGPL doesn’t apply when you are accessing the server over a public API.
The AGPL does apply when interacting with the covered work (Lemmy server) over a network. A proprietary client would still nevertheless be required, upon request, to furnish you with the source code of the covered work it is talking to over the network (the Lemmy server).
Do you really know what you are talking about? I think you’re bullshitting. We are talking about propriety client which doesnt modified the source codes of the server.
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There are a bunch of good FOSS Lemmy clients, which I’d argue are as good as Sync or Boost (I can’t know for sure since I don’t use proprietary software, I judge by the screenshots).
Jerboa sucks, I’ll give you that. But both Voyager and Eternity are high quality clients that work amazingly well and are constantly updated. They have plenty of features and are very configurable.
That’s silly and I’m a long time Linux user.
Indeed.
Voyager
It’s a FOSS privacy respecting Lemmy client.
It’s available on Android and IOS
You can also try it as a PWA: https://vger.app
Another one URL I use: https://wefwef.app/
The OG
Your lemmy app has ads???
Jerboa. It lacks some features, but it’s the official app and it’s also pretty minimalistic with its material you UI. Other than that Thunder is pretty good. They’re both FOSS.
I used Thunder at first but it would crash frequently. Why? I don’t know. It’d just stop working. Very frustrating because it is otherwise very good.
Switched to Jerboa after a couple of weeks and it’s been great.
I start with whatever is on F-Droid, and narrow it down from there.
Jerboa was the only option there until recently. I see Voyager and Eternity are there now. I’ll have to give them a try.
Voyager is currently many versions ahead of the one listed on F-Droid. It is still usable but you may want to get the latest version from GitHub.
If new versions don’t make it to F-Droid, they might as well not exist for me. There are only a couple of apps that I find important enough that I’ll spend time manually building/pulling/installing, and a Lemmy reader isn’t one of them. Thanks for the tip, though.
Have you considered using https://github.com/imranr98/obtainium You give it the repository of the app and it will handle checking for new versions and updating them
Part of what I value in F-Droid is the additional layer in the build/release process, because it makes tampering more likely to be detected.
It’s still nice to know a tool like obtanium exists, though. Thanks for the link.
This is exactly the reason why I don’t like F-Droid as a way to get apps. You’ll have to trust an additional party when getting your apps, and updates are often a couple days behind. I prefer to get it straight from the developer’s GitHub or Coderberg or whatever.
You’ll have to trust an additional party when getting your apps, and updates are often a couple days behind.
I know how it works, and in this case, that’s fine with me.
F-Droid has an excellent track record; better than many developers have. And I’m not addicted to having the latest versions of everything on the day they’re released. In fact, not immediately jumping on the latest versions has saved me from nasty bugs more than once.
Part of what I value in F-Droid is the additional layer in the build/release process, because it makes tampering more likely to be detected.
Barely and not really. “F-Droid can’t ensure the apps are safe. You still need to trust the upstream developers. We only do some basic check.” https://forum.f-droid.org/t/is-it-as-safe-as-it-is-from-fdroid-official-repo/15956/2
N + 1 > N
N + X - Y ? N
Except now you’re adding an additional party to trust (the -Y). So it could still be considered less secure than N.
thunder is awesome too
Eternity FTW
I’m not sure why people insist on F-Droid, considering the F-Droid Security Issues.
I use it because, contrary to what that scare piece you linked would have the reader believe, it’s better for my needs than the alternatives.
(I’m no stranger to software development and security, by the way. I understand the pros and cons.)
that scare piece you linked would have the reader believe
So an indepth and critical analysis of something is now a “scare piece?” Ok.
Eternity is great! free, no ads, and no lag while scrolling. it also supports swipe to go back from posts.
I’m so used to navigating in Eternity at this point that all other apps seem clunky and unintuitive
same
I use Connect for lemmy, it’s really great and ad-free.
I’ve tried all the other popular apps, and keep coming back to Connect.
The main features that pull me back are profile-specific settings so I can set up different accounts without having to reconfigure everything every time I switch instances, and the ability to customize post card quick actions, specifically the Mark As Read quick button combined with the persistent Hide All Read toggle. It’s just so convenient, I keep coming back even though it deletes my account info every time it logs me out.Connect rarely makes it on these lists, but I think it’s fantastic.
This is why ad blockers should always be used. Small devs don’t have relationships with advertisers or control over what ad networks will do.
Or you can pay once and be done with them. I think the price of a burger is not a big ask for something you use every day.
I do both.
Even the FBI recommends ad blockers for security.
Eternity.
PREACH, after using infinity for reddit for years this is the only app that I can ever be comfortable with. It’s genuinely amazing, thank you to the person who ported it.
This is the right answer
As always, use free software. Look for Lemmy clients in F-Droid. Voyager is a good one.
It’s always struck me as a bit odd that people choose to use a paid proprietary app to access a free and open source social media platform which is developed and hosted entirely by volunteers based on donations. Whilst I don’t have a problem with people making money off of Lemmy apps, making them proprietary and with ads seems against the spirit of Lemmy
radiowaves are free, radio sets aren’t.
Transmitters aren’t free
It might be greed or to offset their server costs. Or both.
voyager is great, progressive web app, or in your favorite app store.
I am using vger right now, in firefox. I also use the web app without a download on my phone, as does my husband. Voyager is amazing.
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