The Boost android client for Lemmy is displaying these dark pattern ads pretending to be system notifications. What security/privacy conscious Lemmy clients do you recommend?

backhdlp , 5 months ago

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

Arin , 5 months ago

I'm using android Connect for lemmy and it's pretty good

Max_P , 5 months ago

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.

otter , 5 months ago

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

Darkassassin07 , 5 months ago

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.

knobbysideup , 5 months ago

To be truly effective you must also block DoH and DoT. The first can only be done with endpoint lists, since it is https.

N0x0n , 5 months ago

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?

Darkassassin07 , 5 months ago

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.

x2XS2L0U , 5 months ago

I like Thunder a lot.

nezrock , 5 months ago

I use Connect for lemmy, it's really great and ad-free.

HypnoticSheep , 5 months ago

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.

itsnicodegallo , 5 months ago

Connect rarely makes it on these lists, but I think it's fantastic.

01189998819991197253 , 5 months ago

I use the webpage as a webapp. It's adless.

lemann , 5 months ago

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