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Can we have some clarification on what "Usage Data" the app collects and shares with advertisers?
(lemmy.world)
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?
My go-to analogy is Usenet. Back when usenet basically was the internet for a lot of people, you’d have access to a usenet server through your school, isp, or with a separate subscription to a usenet provider. Usenet itself was free and there were open source implementations of the client and server side components. There were also commercial implementations. The important thing was that net news ran on an open protocol that no company owned. Companies and individuals were free to do what they wanted.
I would not hesitate to buy a client that achieved the functionality of Apollo, or even Alien Blue. I didn’t really start using reddit until I had a good client, and I can see client-side issues being a hurdle to lemmy adoption. I’d prefer paying for a client over ad support. Still, the free and open source client community should be core going forward. I can even see the potential for a commercial server, once the community reaches critical mass in terms of content.
I’ve been involved with the foss community since my first linux install back in like 1994 or so. I remember when rms and esr were household names, so long as your household was a dorm room with cs majors. Like with linux (gnu/linux?) commercial and foss apps can co-exist, and like with linux there should remain a foss purist option in addition to the mixed mode option.
I don’t think the fediverse is facing a threat of commercial takeover - certainly not the lemmyverse. If anything, the threat is not onboarding enough people to be competitive with whatever reddit clone manages to launch in the next year or so, and which has the commercial backing to drive users to the service and have stable, scalable, and production quality code.
Just imagine: Microsoft creating a lemmy.xbox.com and creating centralized gaming communities like !halo@lemmy.xbox.com or !doom@lemmy.bethesda.com instead of hosting it on discord or reddit.
The only issue I see with it are:
I totally get that. I watched in real time when MS tried to kill Netscape by bundling Internet Explorer with Windows and used their “embrace and extend” business model to try to reserve the web for their proprietary browser. Ot didn’t work, but there was a lot of pushback both legally and socially.
I think that we don’t have to worry about MS coming in for a while. I am interested to see how Facebook makes things work if and when they integrate Threads, but afaik no one is in an analogous position in terms of making a commercial, reddit-like experience tied to the fediverse.
I mean, reddit’s model isn’t that great. They filed for an IPO on Dec 21 for $15B and since then have been marked down to about $5B, and that was before the APIpocalypse. That means that a) all of the current institutional and VC investors lost about 2/3 of their money and that spez and company have similarly seen their ineptitude slash their dreams of Musk-like wealth, and b) value-wise, they’re heading back to 2019 when they were smaller. It’s a terrible time for them to try doing an IPO. The fact that they haven’t pulled it makes it feel like they know the game of musical chairs is winding up and they just want to get out with even a quarter of what they expected.
This was my thought as well. It makes sense for companies to setup their own Fediverse instances. It provides them a way to reach their customers without having to rely on another company acting as the middleman.
Mastodon is really solid and with the Dutch government and the BBC running their own instance I imagine others will follow suite.
Still not sure about a Reddit replacement though since both Lemmy and kBin have their problems.
Spin up a PeerTube instance and companies have an effective means of setting up discussion forums for their products, a news feed for broadcasting updates, and a video hosting solution that can all be tied together through the Fediverse.
!halo and !doom community at lemmy.xbox.com wow!
That means we're in very early days of Lemmy.
Surprising times ahead!