I think now is a great time to remind everyone, like sync’s developer, Lemmy’s developers need to be paid too! The amount of time all the devs put into making lemmy exist, in my opinion, should be worth some of your money. If you can afford it, donating to the people who develop lemmy and/or the people keeping your home instance up will accelerate the incredible growth of lemmy!
The problem is that, for that decade, Sync has been benefiting from reddit, and now Lemmy. And reddit/Lemmy were the ones footing the majority of the operating costs so that Sync could be useful.
While obviously not a perfect example, think of it as letting your friend stay in your spare room. And then they decide to run a business out of that room and you have customers coming at all hours of the day.
This is increasingly a concern with the modern internet. All of those super popular streamers and youtubers? They are profiting off the content of game devs and other youtubers (ironically, it is the hot tub streamers who are stealing the least content). And plenty of content creators have come out and talked about how they increasingly hate “Reaction” content (Hasan getting special mention for just playing full videos to his chat while he has a piss break).
I am glad Sync is a product people feel is worth paying for. Not my thang, but it doesn’t need to be. But… let’s just say that if the only thing to come out of the reddit debacles over the past few months were “Third party apps need to serve ads or pay for expensive API keys” I would probably actively not care.
Just to be clear. I very much feel that creators deserve to get paid, even if they build on top of the work of others. Maybe less so people who just stream content with no comment while they take a shit but, generally speaking, even just interacting with chat while you play a round of Valorant is “transformative” in my book.
But it DOES suck how many developers, services, and creators are more or less getting screwed over in the interest of “exposure”.
Reddit has benefitted from Sync, and other 3rd party apps, way more than Sync has benefitted from Reddit.
It’s less clear cut with Lemmy, which is supposed to evolve an ecosystem of free tools, so it might be that some day Sync will be benefitting from Lemmy more than Lemmy from Sync… but for now, Lemmy is relatively bare bones, like what Reddit used to be 15 years ago, so any 3rd party app with extra features is still a good thing.
Fortunately, Lemmy has no incentive to go closed source, like Reddit did (let’s not forget Reddit used to be open source while it was convenient for them, then it wasn’t).
Genuine question:
Why did reddit benefit from Sync but Lemmy doesn’t? In both cases, it is a third party app (with premium options or ads that support Sync and not the service it is engaging with) that greatly increases utility for “power users”. So that more or less means that it provides “exposure” by encouraging power users to make the content that casual users will come back to the site for.
And there is the argument that that actually could be bad if the product has no viable monetization strategy but user count keeps increasing but… yeah.