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
Privacy
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
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.
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.
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!
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
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
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
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 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.
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
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.
As always, use free software. Look for Lemmy clients in F-Droid. Voyager is a good one.
voyager is great, progressive web app, or in your favorite app store.
Jerboa
Install the fdroid apps. Eternity is a good example of a fdroid app for lemmy
- Voyager for Lemmy
- NextDNS to kill basically all 3rd party ad networks and tracking
Use foss apps
Thanks for the warning, switching to Jerboa.
Maybe I'm behind on my terms but does this count as a dark pattern?
It was my understanding that dark patterns are a thing designed to use a service in a way that they wouldn't normally intend to, like renew a subscription or leave privacy options to the benefit of the company instead of the user.
This just seems like a scam, or at best highly deceptive advertising? Like, for it to be a dark pattern it would have to actually be able to send you to some android update system, but it almost certainly isn't ever going to do that.
I really like Voyager.
Use F-Droid, Google store is a malware vendor at this point.
Eternity. It was a FOSS Reddit client before the API stuff but they became a Lemmy client.