The ads come from an ad network where there is very little visibility into what’s going to be displayed in your app. And bad people also keep managing to get their ads published even though the ad network doesn’t allow them
And it all ties into the whole targeted advertising, where they also make sure very few people get the bad ad, and tries to target people they think may be more susceptible to these kinds of tactics. Depending on the amount of interactivity allowed, the ad can even display two different things if it deems you too savvy to fall for it.
It’s basically unescapable unless you only use apps without ads, or pay for the ad-free versions.
The whole advertising industry is sketchy, more news at 10.
Pi-hole blocks ads served by these networks just fine. Never seen an ad in Boost for Lemmy or for Reddit, though I tend to use Jerboa now that I’ve gotten used to it while I was waiting for Boost for Lemmy to release.
DNS based adblocking like Pihole or Adguard limits you to receiving advertising hosted by the app provider (youtube for example) which is usually better curated than third party advertising networks and less commonly found at all.
To be truly effective you must also block DoH and DoT. The first can only be done with endpoint lists, since it is https.
Hey, could you elaborate or send some lecture? I have the upstream quad9 DoH address in adguard. It’s supposed to better encrypt my traffic right? Never saw any ads or strange DNS requests.
Never heard about ads being inject though DoH or DoT, or did I misunderstood your comment?
Theoretically an app could use a custom DoH endpoint to retrieve ads instead of the standard dns provided by the system. As this uses purely https without a preceding dns request, pihole/adguard would fail to block it; but it’s just not something currently employed.
Yep, also the ads don’t get initialized at all if the user buys the ad-free version (going to top all in the Lemmy Boost community should bring up the post about it). It’s relatively cheap and the dev is very active with bugs and requests. The dev is developing for the Fediverse and I’m happy to support that (as well as devs for Sync, Connect, Lemmy, etc.)
I like Boost and paid for ad-Free, but a lot of other clients should work for your needs. While they might not be privacy focussed, many are open source so you can check what is going on.
My preference goes
- Boost (not FOSS, one time payment to remove ads)
- Connect (not FOSS, ad free)
- Eternity (FOSS & ad free)
I uninstalled the other ones and haven’t kept up with them. There may be better ones out there, these are the ones I’m keeping up with
This is why ad blockers should always be used. Small devs don’t have relationships with advertisers or control over what ad networks will do.
Or you can pay once and be done with them. I think the price of a burger is not a big ask for something you use every day.
I do both.
I use Connect for lemmy, it’s really great and ad-free.
I’ve tried all the other popular apps, and keep coming back to Connect.
The main features that pull me back are profile-specific settings so I can set up different accounts without having to reconfigure everything every time I switch instances, and the ability to customize post card quick actions, specifically the Mark As Read quick button combined with the persistent Hide All Read toggle. It’s just so convenient, I keep coming back even though it deletes my account info every time it logs me out.Connect rarely makes it on these lists, but I think it’s fantastic.
Thunder gets regular updates and is open source and ad free.
Second this. Thunder has been great
I start with whatever is on F-Droid, and narrow it down from there.
Jerboa was the only option there until recently. I see Voyager and Eternity are there now. I’ll have to give them a try.
Voyager is currently many versions ahead of the one listed on F-Droid. It is still usable but you may want to get the latest version from GitHub.
If new versions don’t make it to F-Droid, they might as well not exist for me. There are only a couple of apps that I find important enough that I’ll spend time manually building/pulling/installing, and a Lemmy reader isn’t one of them. Thanks for the tip, though.
Have you considered using https://github.com/imranr98/obtainium You give it the repository of the app and it will handle checking for new versions and updating them
Part of what I value in F-Droid is the additional layer in the build/release process, because it makes tampering more likely to be detected.
It’s still nice to know a tool like obtanium exists, though. Thanks for the link.
I like Thunder a lot.
Seconded for Thunder and it is available cross platform (iOS and Android). I like Voyager too but Thunder uses iPad screen real estate better IMO. RIP Liftoff
Voyager the 🐐no 🧢
Jerboah??
+1
I don’t think it shows any ads.
Of course not.
Iirc Sync and Boost are the only proprietary clients right now, so everything else is good. I’m using Eternity right now, it’s on f droid
I’m using android Connect for lemmy and it’s pretty good
Eternity. It was a FOSS Reddit client before the API stuff but they became a Lemmy client.
Please. For the love of god, NEVER use a proprietary app to use a piece of FOSS software. I think it’s kind of sad that we have this amazing FOSS social network and people use fucking proprietary software to use it.
Indeed.
Open-source it a better interface then.
Until it’s as useful as at least Sync for Lemmy, people will use 3rd party proprietary apps
Thunder
I’m not so sure about clients that are specifically focused on security and privacy, however my general FOSS mobile app suggestions would be Voyager for a polished UX, or Eternity for a more native Android experience.
Both are available on GitHub and F-Droid
Jerboa (FOSS. Play Store + F-Droid)
Voyager (FOSS. Play Store + F-Droid + PWA + iOS App Store)
Thunder (FOSS. Play Store + IzzyOnDroid + iOS App Store)
Eternity (FOSS. Play Store + F-Droid)
edit: formatting
As a user of RedReader since launch a decade+ ago, I dig Thunder. Simple, no bullshit, logical settings.
I use Voyager. It’s pretty good.
