• ExtremeDullard@lemmy.sdf.org
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    4 months ago

    Paid apps: no problem. If it’s good, I’ll pay.

    Subscription: maybe, if it’s worth it.

    Ads: F-Droid can fuck right off. If they do that, they’d be a miserable bunch of sellouts.

    • TheTechnician27@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Yeah, as long as the payment method is FOSS, secure, and works as intended, I have no serious issue with pay-once software being introduced. There are apps from F-Droid I would pay a few dollars to use if required, and I’d be happy if it meant more and higher-quality software.

      I feel like the freemium model they mention with subscriptions is just begging for F-Droid to be enshittified. F-Droid would really, really need to prove themselves with pay-once applications first for my liking before moving onto something so much more drastic.

      And then ads are just a non-starter. Ads only exist to be psychologically manipulative, they’re obnoxious as fuck in the present day, they’re a privacy nightmare, and they’re a vector for malware. I would see it as a betrayal of what F-Droid does for me, and I would actively see F-Droid as being sellouts who are only marginally better than using Aurora at that point.

    • sovietknuckles[they]@lemmy.ml
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      4 months ago

      If they were talking about Privacy-Preserving Attribution like Firefox is experimenting with supporting on MDN, that would be one thing, but it doesn’t sound like that’s what F-Droid is talking about.

      Not only are privacy and data protection founding principles for both Mobifree and F-Droid, the use of tracking-based in-app advertising poses a moral dilemma as well. If someone wants to gain access to an app, but does not have the financial means to purchase it, they can use it at a different kind of price - their user data.

      F-Droid is also considering ads that contain no tracking, which removes that moral dillema, IMO:

      It should be mentioned that it is possible to include in-app advertising without user tracking. However the lead conversion ratio drops dramatically, so the efficacy of this approach is not nearly as high.

      That’s basically what PPA is, advertising without tracking. If advertisers want to pay for it, then great.

      Edit: Downvoting without responding like lemmitor

      • ExtremeDullard@lemmy.sdf.org
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        4 months ago

        F-Droid is also considering ads that contain no tracking, which removes that moral dillema, IMO:

        You assume everybody is okay with ads.

        I’m not. My brainspace has been highjacked since I was a little kid by stupid advertisers. To this day, I remember ads for products that have disappeared decades ago and that I never gave a shit about at any point in my life.

        Why are advertisers allowed to force their shit into my head?

        I hate ads. I’m utterly intolerant of advertising. I hate the tracking and the malware that come with ads, but I hate ads even more. There are no moral ads. The advertisement industry is a despicable leech that needs to die.

        If F-Droid springs this shit on me, I swear to god I’m gonna start having murderous thoughts…

        • EatMyPixelDust@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          4 months ago

          My brainspace has been highjacked since I was a little kid by stupid advertisers. To this day, I remember ads for products that have disappeared decades ago and that I never gave a shit about at any point in my life.

          Why are advertisers allowed to force their shit into my head?

          I hate ads. I’m utterly intolerant of advertising.

          This. So much this.

        • Auli@lemmy.ca
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          4 months ago

          Would you pay a monthly fee for everything? YouTube Facebook Reddit random site you visit. We would need like a found in our browser and every site you visited took there chunk out or something like that. People seem to forget this stuff costs money to run.

          • ExtremeDullard@lemmy.sdf.org
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            4 months ago

            If the service is worth it and subscribing isn’t yet another opportunity to put me under surveillance - which is the main reason why, although I consume a lot of YouTube videos and I would genuinely pay Google for the service, I won’t - yes.

            Hint: Facebook and Reddit aren’t worth it. If they want to exit the ad-supported business model and disappear behind a paywall, I won’t miss anything in my life.

      • eco_game@discuss.tchncs.de
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        4 months ago

        The first quote is taken out of context:

        Not only are privacy and data protection founding principles for both Mobifree and F-Droid, the use of tracking-based in-app advertising poses a moral dilemma as well. If someone wants to gain access to an app, but does not have the financial means to purchase it, they can use it at a different kind of price - their user data.

        For me this reads as them explaining and condemning that dilemma, instead of considering it as an option for F-Droid.

        • sovietknuckles[they]@lemmy.ml
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          4 months ago

          Sorry, I was trying to save space, but I can see how only starting the quote in the middle of the paragraph is misleading. I edited the quote to include the context.

          For me this reads as them explaining and condemning that dilemma, instead of considering it as an option for F-Droid.

          IMO, it read more like acknowledging concerns around ads but not explicitly condemning it. But I’m not going to form an opinion about it until they do something, or at least make their intentions clearer.

        • sovietknuckles[they]@lemmy.ml
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          4 months ago

          ads in Firefox

          That’s a common misconception. For users like myself who use uBlock Origin, Firefox supporting PPA changes nothing at all (as pointed out by the Firefox CTO). The only users who would see an ad that uses PPA are users who would otherwise see ads that use tracking.

          That is why the EFF supports it.

          • Possibly linux@lemmy.zip
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            4 months ago

            That is just dancing around the issue. The problem is them turning on baked in browser advertising by default.

            • sovietknuckles[they]@lemmy.ml
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              4 months ago

              Again, it’s not advertising, it’s a form of privacy protection. There are no ads in Firefox, and they did not add any mechanism for tracking users, so calling it browser advertising is advertising your own technology illiteracy.