The way I see it, FOSS is like a public option. It's very important to provide a baseline functionally that paid apps need to exceed to be competitive. That's a great thing, but that doesn't mean it's wrong for paid apps to exist that provide a more polished experience, and if you can't afford it, the ads really aren't that intrusive, but if they annoy too much you can just use FOSS.

What's great about Lenny is that this choice cannot be taken away from us. There will always be competition both FOSS and paid because lemmy is an open platform and healthy competition is a great thing.

People have a hate boner for non-FOSS. There are no other high quality Lemmy apps. Choice is only an illusion. Now go to the app store and download your mandatory Sync app /s

People on the internet tend to latch onto memes for the hell of it. Do they really care about it? Probably not. It's just the topic of the week, like X, Threads, the Titanic, etc. I would hope that people would be a lot less harsh to the Sync developer...I doubt that the people fanning the anti-Sync flames are doing it to try and lower prices.