I’ve heard that argument before too – but again, no other Lemmy app uses ads. Having them is pretty damn intrusive when the alternative is simply not having them.

Of course, it’s the dev’s prerogative to sell a closed-source product, and their choice to be paid for it. I support that. But the issue gets deeper since Lemmy is ultimately FOSS. Lemmy needs donations to survive. I’d wager that most folks who paid to remove ads from Sync aren’t paying their instance for their bandwidth, so it ends up being an unnecessary stumbling block for the platform.