Based on stuff like this and various comments from them in the past the lemmy.world admins I'm pretty sure wank themselves raw over becoming the new reddit
By which I mean, eventually having a corporate structure, obtaining funding from VCs, the whole disgusting thing
im pretty sure on the nsfw lemmy instance there is one about girls that look as young as physically possible while being 18 and it's named after jailbait which i hope i dont need to explain is pedo shit
This is actually a move away from the Reddit model. They want to ban all the tech nerds that discuss stuff like free open source software and the evils of advertising and tracking to try appeal to a wider audience of more, for lack of a better word, 'ordinary' people. They're not going after the old school Reddit demographic with this, it's about appealing to newer Reddit and twitter users who don't care much about these kind of things.
That's a terrible approach. Everyone knows the cycle is:
Innovators > Early adopters > Early Majority > Late Majority > Laggards
Trying to jump straight to early and late majority is literally pointless. You must target the kinds of people that will be the earliest users. The switch from this crowd to the "majority" crowd literally has its own name and many many books, it's called "crossing the chasm" because there's a giant hole in between the early adopters and the majority that is very difficult to bridge.
Why the fuck would you risk damaging your community over what FREE third party app you use. Whoever this person is should not be in charge of any communities they are completely irresponsible and don't actually give a fuck about the health of their community because they don't ask basic questions like "will this hurt or help my community?" before taking actions.
As far as I understand it, the pop up about consenting to user data being used is for the standardised Google ads, which most android apps with built in ads use. If you use a system wide adblocker or pay for the application, the pop up about user data does not appear because the Google advertising SDK is never initialised. I have tried the app, and did not get the pop up about user data as I use DNS level Adblock.
If people aren't a fan of Google's advertising network (I'm certainly not), they should already be using Adblock and blocking trackers, or only using FOSS apps on a degoogled android device. Because Google's ads are literally everywhere. This is far from the only application on Android or iOS implementing Google's advertising network to make money.
The Lemmy world admins are obviously in the wrong here though. I understand what they want to do (make the website more appealing to 'normal' people), but I heavily disagree with the approach. I think most people are capable of discussing these issues given that they are adequately informed.
Wait, wtf did they do in order to deserve this, besides their hostility to us? Did they implement anti-3rd party app measures or something in their community?