this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2025

739 points (75.9% liked)

You Should Know

36288 readers

692 users here now

YSK - for all the things that can make your life easier!

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)

Rule 1- All posts must begin with YSK.

All posts must begin with YSK. If you're a Mastodon user, then include YSK after @youshouldknow. This is a community to share tips and tricks that will help you improve your life.

Rule 2- Your post body text must include the reason "Why" YSK:

**In your post's text body, you must include the reason "Why" YSK: It’s helpful for readability, and informs readers about the importance of the content. **

Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.

Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.

Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.

Rule 6- Regarding non-YSK posts.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-YSK posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.

If you harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

If you are a member, sympathizer or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.

For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.

Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.

Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.

Rule 10- The majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.

Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.

Rule 11- Posts must actually be true: Disiniformation, trolling, and being misleading will not be tolerated. Repeated or egregious attempts will earn you a ban. This also applies to filing reports: If you continually file false reports YOU WILL BE BANNED! We can see who reports what, and shenanigans will not be tolerated.

Partnered Communities:

You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.

Community Moderation

For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.

Credits

Our icon(masterpiece) was made by @clen15!

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

739

YSK: Lemmy browsing app Boost is tracking your data for profiling and more! Consider using other trackingless Lemmy apps such as Jerboa or Voyager (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

239 comments fedilink hide all child comments

According to the tracking scanner Exodus (can be found on F-Droid), which keeps an updated database on trackers and runs your installed app against its register, you can track what apps are tracking you and clues of how. Saw that Boost is tracking me and uninstalled it and went straight to Jerboa. Jerboa is pretty similar to good ole' RedditIsFun-app and easy to use, so I am personally recommending it.

From F-Droid:

Exodus (Exodus show you trackers and permissions in apps installed on your device.) https://f-droid.org/packages/org.eu.exodus_privacy.exodusprivacy/

top 50 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

What about "Eternity"? I love it for Lemmy and no ads

Awesome and smooth UI

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

Eternity is good, sadly it's rarely gets update from dev

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago

you guys are not blocking trackers?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago

Big fan Of Sync, but idk if it has tracking

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 weeks ago

This reads like a paid advertisement.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Or you can buy Boost and get rid of the ad/tracking.

Boost is brilliant and other apps still have catching up to do but the competition is getting better and better.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I've used boost for forever in reddit, I used it when it came to lemmy.

But voyager is better.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Will give it a shot, thanks! Though I'm very happy with boost currently - what does voyager do better?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago

Yes give it a try.

I'm not saying that boost lacks anything. But it's the feel that I get when using Voyager. I know it's weird, but, it's my enjoyment that made me switch.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago

It really whips the llamas ass

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

i use lemmy on firefox browser mobile and desktop?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago

Try the Photon WebApp client, there is public instances but you can self-host yours ! Still early but enjoying it so far !

[–] [email protected] -5 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Or just use a browser, ffs.

everything doesnt need to be an app.

especially when its nothing but a goddamn webbrowser, wrapped in an app, with less protection.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

They're not just browsers, they're accessing the posts via an API and presenting it in a bespoke manner with purpose-built controls.

That's good because it's faster and lower-data than a webpage, and it's easier and faster to use on mobile.

Not every app is just a web browser, that's a particular kind of lazy app created by the app hype bubble like 20 years ago.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

I really don't know anything about the technicalities of apps, but you should try http://phtn.app/ on mobile, it's UI is pretty good.
That being said if there was an app for it I would totally prefer that over a webpage in my browser

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago

I use it on desktop, despite some bugs from time to time I really enjoy the experience and slick design ! It's still in early alpha so honestly I am impressed !

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago

That's very laggy for me, whereas my lemmy app, voyager, is extremely smooth.

It's building a general purpose UI as a webpage which then has to be interpreted via your browser which then serves the UI up to you. Because this browser has to handle literally whatever is being thrown at it at all times, there is a lot of overhead and extra processes running to make it work correctly.

All of the graphics are equivalent, every line between every element, every button, every image is represented in the same data that the text is, so the phone is interpreting and rendering many times more stuff.

In contrast, a native app takes the bare text & media data and renders it in native controls, so the phone is able take a tiny amount of data and fit it into a template that renders natively on the phone. It's doing orders of magnitude less work.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Why use a browser?

Just learn how to parse raw HTTP responses. That’s all a browser does, with less protection.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Nope, you can't actually do that anymore since there's SSL in the way. I tried anyway, though, just for giggles:

drath@machine:~$ telnet lemm.ee 80
Trying 2606:4700:20::681a:5f3...
Connected to lemm.ee.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET /
<html>
<head><title>400 Bad Request</title></head>
<body>
<center><h1>400 Bad Request</h1></center>
<hr><center>cloudflare</center>
</body>
</html>
Connection closed by foreign host.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I remembered Boost from the good old days a while back and am using it alongside voyager. It's not as great as I remembered, so I'll probably stick with Voyager. My home network keeps me safe of ads though 😉

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago

Nice, I'm on the same boat. Voyager is superior to boost

load more comments