Makes no sense. Mozilla has no horse in the advertising race. But Google does. Almost all of Google’s profits are from ads. Ads keep the entire Alphabet house of cards afloat.

But not Mozilla. The largest connection there is them being paid for default lt search engine.

and since the state was not democratic

How do you define “democratic?” Because the “soviet” of “soviet union” is a type of council which was directly elected by citizens. The USSR was a democratic republic in that each soviet usually voted for a higher level soviet. Not that unusual, especially back then.

Now, I’m not suggesting that the books were never cooked. We know that Stalin rigged at least some higher level elections at the very least.

But “democratic” does not mean multi-party. It can also be “no party” or “three parties” or anything. In the USSR you could run for your local soviet or petition them to vote for you. Yes, you’d have to be a party member. But that doesn’t mean blind allegiance and no differing thought. I’ve brought it up before, but you had severe infighting in the party because of the diversity of opinions and thought, not lack of it. Sure, they were all communists or some flavor thereof at least superficially. But there’s a hell of a difference between Stalin and Kruschev and Gorbachev as examples.

And, Stalin aside given his prominence in the early years of the nation, the other prominent leaders were very dependant on entities like the Supreme Soviet which was elected by your elected representatives.

Different != undemocratic.

America believes month/day/year for some stupid fucking reason.

It’s because of Great Britain. We adopted it from them while a bunch of colonies and it regionally spread to others.

America didn’t change, probably because we have been so geographically isolated (relatively speaking), whereas the modern day UK did change to be more like Europe.

People get so goddamn hot and bothered by things that ultimately don’t matter almost like it is a culture war issue. Americans maintain the mm/dd/yyyy format because that’s how speak the dates.

I wouldn’t say it is us Americans who “find it hard to read” if someone from elsewhere in the world sees an American date, knows we date things in the old way they used to date things, and then loses their minds over having to swap day for month. Everyone just wants to be contrarian and circle jerk about ISO and such.

Us devs, on the other hand, absolutely should use the same format of yyyy-mm-dd plus time and time zone offset, as needed. There’s no reason, in this age, for dates to be culturally distinct in the tech space. Follow a machine-first standard and then convert just like we do with all other localizatons.

But hey, if people want to be pedantic, let’s talk about archaic gendered languages which are completely useless and has almost zero consistency.

Wait until the non-technical reddit exiles learn about defederation and start whipping themselves up into frenzies trying to purge things they mildly disagree with or flat out don’t like. Just like the good old days on reddit with banning people for participating in verboten subreddits.

Keep the worst of reddit and Twitter off lemmy, folks. Plenty of platforms for those types.

Most people don’t do that. Look at the donor count for Lemmy World vs DAU.

LJ (dev of Sync) has had a patreon for years. The patrons pale in comparison to the people who used Sync for Reddit, and I’m sure Lemmy as well. Patron-types are outliers among outliers.

If it is impossible to make a living and work on these apps with either reasonable app pricing or no ads, then why is Sync the only app for Lemmy with these strings attached?

Sync is a “professional” app. The others are mostly hobbyists. That’s the ultimate difference. Same as with Apollo. You had a bunch of open source reddit clients, but a hobby piece of software will seldom outshine a professional product. Sometimes it happens, but that’s the exception not the norm. Sync has been incredibly stable for me over the last day. Memmy on my phone and Connect haven’t been. No shade to the devs, but devs approach a solution differently when that is how they support themselves. Passion can only carry a project so far, speaking as a dev myself.

I’ve noticed that the people losing their minds over Sync and solo software devs trying to make a living while keeping apps accessible, aren’t the ones beating down the doors to contribute their time and skill and labor for open source. Most of them don’t strike me as devs at all. I’m used to it. It’s the lemmy equivalent of your one family member asking you to make them an app for free at a family Christmas.

People that are passionate about FOSS/FLOSS should definitely use those things. And support them financially. And contribute. But somehow the meta has become to dogpile on the first major third party app for our community that had a lot of users on reddit and which makes onboarding easy.

The key detail you are missing is that most people that left reddit did so on the backs of closed source third party apps. That’s what kicked off the entire firestorm of events. The reality was that, of those who used third party apps, most used closed sourced solutions.

FOSS is great. FLOSS is even better. People should support projects they identify with, just like people should support their home Lemmy instance via community funding. But far too many of the argument I’m seeing against Sync and others basically boils down to “we shouldn’t pay for software,” like our [software engineer] labor is just something to be had for free.

Closed source third party apps are no threat to Lemmy. The failings of reddit cannot happen to Lemmy so long as one instance does not come to define Lemmy in such a way that they can self-isolate and essentially turn into a proprietary model itself. Let’s all recall that Reddit was, once upon a time, open source.

Third party apps are about choice. I hardly consider someone using a closed source third party app–in a sea of many, many FOSS versions–a loss of freedom or an abusive relationship. Come on, that’s very hyperbolic. And I’d wager 99% of people can’t verify that trust even if they wanted to since most people don’t understand code, let alone software development practices. They just take the word of random strangers whom they have no right trusting saying “yeah it looks good.”