For those offended by subscription for ad-free experience and data collection, consider Connect for Lemmy. No data collection and no pay-to-browse scheme.

play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kuronek…

People are willinh to pay for a better experience.

I think you are missing the problem here. Paying for a good product or extra features is one thing. Paying to remove the ads that you added in the first place is another. Lemmy is funded entirely by donations and doesn’t have any ads.

It’s a pretty bad look that is fundamentally against the goals of Lemmy as ad free an open platform with a free API. Otherwise we are going to go down the same rabbit hole again and again like what happened with Reddit.

Lemmy choosing not to serve ads doesn’t mean nobody else is allowed to. I have no issues with Sync serving ads at all. Heck, I wouldn’t even care if Lemmy served them. People have a right to be paid a reasonable amount for their effort

This is more relevant for Lemmy than client apps, but the problem with relying on ads is that you then become beholden to the ad-buyers.

I think that can be mitigated by operating as a non-profit that is not seeking to launch a multi-billion IPO at some point in the future, however. Decentralization is the answer to the "growth problem" that the last decade of failed tech investments has constantly run into.