Don’t get me wrong, bringing more visibility to the platform will always be good, but wanting to jump ship from e.g. Jerboa to a port of one of those proprietary apps (Boost, Sync, etc.) kinda defeats the point of using an open platform in the first place.
I fully believe that each app developer should get their work recognized and make their apps paid if they wanted, I’m sure many will be inclined to buy them from the store still because of the convenience and/or wanting to support the developer.
But I think alongside the API conversion there should also be a shift in the development paradigm that follows up on the culture of the whole platform, Lemmy is free (as in freedom I mean) software, most of the Fediverse is, of course no one forces you to make your client free too, but the developers should feel encouraged to embrace that way of working and in turn users should be attracted to options that were made so, that will also foster powerful growth of the platform when everyone can examine, learn and contribute since clients play a crucial part in the interaction with the service
Yes I agree, it’s very shitty on Reddit’s behalf and I feel sorry for every developer that saw their work being made more or less useless, I understand all the effort and countless hours that go into that.
I’m slightly pulling everyone’s leg here, I don’t want to be toxic and say “oh you didn’t open source your stuff? Then you’re WORTHLESS!!!”, the devs have all the right in choosing how to handle their own things, on the other hand maybe it can be some food for thought for the users, for example we see how Infinity will still stand for now (maybe ever?) because it is open source and now everyone can make their modifications to effectively have an own “Infinity”, the name turned out to be quite prophetic lol.
Either way things go, I really do hope that apps, proprietary or otherwise keep a paid for version as the published one or just as an option, that would be the least they can do to get some recognition back after having been torn down