It's a for profit public company. I've been playing around with the idea of possibly creating a FOSS app that would run its servers via donations and (same as duolingo in the beginning at least) community created courses. Would need support from proper linguists though.

There are other apps like that but they lack the sleek UI and gamifying aspect or simply have only one language.

I pay for duolingo so I hate that they are tracking me but it's the only actually fun casual language learning app out there and honestly I don't mind paying for such a good app, but their monetization schemes are getting more aggressive: e.g. time limit games which are nearly impossible without paying for "extra time potions" which you don't get even if you have the paid version.

Edit: just to add to the time-limit games: you can just not participate in them, but fuck me for paying to the app and still having that bullshit in my UI.

[–] onlinepersona@programming.dev 14 points 2 months ago (1 children)

https://librelingo.app/ is looking for contributors 😉 It's written in python, so if you want to take a stab at that, I'm sure they'd be very happy to have you.

Anti Commercial-AI license

[–] Lazycog@sopuli.xyz 5 points 2 months ago

Lemmy provides once again, thanks @onlinepersona@programming.dev! I'll have to see if I can get back into python and take a look into this project

[–] MalikMuaddibSoong@startrek.website 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

time limit games which are nearly impossible without paying for “extra time potions” which you don’t get even if you have the paid version.

Alright then, keep your ~~secrets~~ 3rd star

[–] Lazycog@sopuli.xyz 3 points 2 months ago

I can't keep a calm frodo face while seeing something that has not been completed on my ~~journey~~ duolingo learning path