this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2025
739 points (75.9% liked)

You Should Know

36381 readers
310 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
 

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/

(page 4) 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago (13 children)

Thanks. Just uninstalled it.

load more comments (13 replies)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (2 children)

EDIT: The dev replied below and said there aren't any trackers in the app. It looks like the trackers are actually from web sites that are loaded in the browser internal to the app. I changed the setting to load web pages in an external browser and the tracking notifications from the Connect app went away, so it looks like my original comment below is incorrect and Connect doesn't have any trackers. The trackers I was picking up were from web sites with trackers being loaded in Connect. It looks like the app is fine and you should definitely use it. It's super easy to use and looks good.

~~The duck duck go app tracker firewall thing their browser comes with stops trackers coming from Connect. It's a bummer cuz I like the app but I've been using a web browser more and more to access lemmy.~~

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

I just wanna use one that has material design/material you, so it looks good in my Android phone

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago

Voyager has two themes: one uses Material design for Android users and one uses the old Apollo look-and-feel for iOS users.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago

Can check out Eternity

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Aside from what everyone else has said regarding the ads: Boost is an amazing app and I don't browse Lemmy without it!

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

I guess I'm just legitimately confused about how to feel about it all. Lemmy is free, signing up on an instance is free, people are posting/creating content for free, moderators are taking care of the space for free. No one's locking in to get "fed" through the entire chain. The arguments about abandoned apps doesn't really compute since plenty paid and advertising friendly apps go under/stop developing further as well (and the entire Lemmy eco-system is free so silly points of "capitalism better"). There's also the crux of "Apps just replace a webpage", they're really not reinventing the wheel here.

But, if people prefer paid apps, if the developers want to construct the apps in that manner, have at it. I do think spreading awareness of what apps are out there is important, and how they operate (this is YSK after all). I also wouldn't spend time in my day coming into defend organizations that want to monetize on open source community projects either.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (2 children)

I guess I'm just legitimately confused about how to feel about it all.

The freedom of Lemmy and the fediverse let's people choose how to interact with it.

If a user is looking for a free to use , open source, ad-free experience then that's their choice.

If others are happy to pay for an app because they prefer the experience that app provides them they can choose to do so.

I also wouldn't spend time in my day coming into defend organizations that want to monetize on open source community projects either.

OP read that Boost may contain code used for tracking, then started spewing some conspiracy that "Boost is tracking your data for profiling and more!" without any proof or any actual research.

This isn't a case of defending some giant corporation, it's just stopping tedious drama before it spreads.

If you check OPs profile they've been spreading this for over a week. When I first saw this thread the masses were heavily upvoting the conspiracy and downvoting anyone disagreeing.

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago

Boost is the best!

Launch the Rocket! 🚀

[–] [email protected] 231 points 3 weeks ago (7 children)

As the other comments are saying, this is made very clear when you launch the app for the first time that it is ad supported, and you can donate a small amount to get all tracking and ads removed.

Love the app and I want the dev to continue development so I paid for the ad free. Devs are people and need money to live too, you know this post was just sensationalized for your own clicks.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 3 weeks ago (15 children)

Lemmings have a huge obsession with shit being both free and adfree, youtube is the most baffling one, they refuse to pay for it, then bitch about the ads, it seems they are entitled to having VoD delivered to them anytime anywhere in the world got completely free.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (6 children)

For me at least, my objection with YouTube is that Google takes a cut. I'd much rather contribute an equivalent amount to some creators via patreon and adblock the site.

Also I'm not saying the host doesn't deserve a cut, I just think that corporations like Google are a general pest that should be eradicated

load more comments (6 replies)
load more comments (14 replies)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago (5 children)

Minus the "small amount" part.

load more comments (5 replies)
[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 weeks ago

Ya... I just bought the app. It was like 6 bucks? Totally worth it since I use it all the time and I want to support the dev.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 3 weeks ago

Same! Boost is awesome and it was a no brainer paying for the ad removal

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 18 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (2 children)

YSK that, in general, you should only ever use Android apps from F-Droid unless you've got a very good justification for doing otherwise. That's especially true for generic/basic utility apps like calculators, calendars, and file managers, classic games like solitaire or tetris, and Lemmy clients.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 weeks ago

This is completely natural common sense for you and me, but to other people its alien to live with the "guilty until proven innocent" mindset that needs to be applied to software.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 3 weeks ago

There is a reason so many Lemmy apps are abandoned, they were free and free of advertising. Devs need to eat. I prefer the paid app model to support the devs as opposed to ads. The dev of boost has always been open about how ads work.

load more comments
view more: ‹ prev next ›