Lemmy Finally feels usable! Thank you LJDawson
And 50% of the posts on lemmy in the last 12 hours are about Sync.
Hope we get some more diverse content soon lol
We will. Lemmy seems to easily get flooded with singular stories. Eg whenever Elon comes up with yet another dumbass decision.
Yeah im honestly starting to question if its all organic, as its trivially easy to artificially inflate posts, and we even had a post the other week warning exactly of app developers could manipulate votes to get more people to use their platform and make purchases.
There are clearly a lot of bots posting links but that’s not that different from reddit either. The real friends were the comments anyway.
I’ve been using sync for reddit for years, and I used Vanced to keep sync for reddit working even today. I was interested in trying lemmy ever since it was announced that the popular third party apps were going away on Reddit. I might have started using Lemmy earlier if it wasn’t for being able to still use Sync for Reddit and knowing that Sync for Lemmy was coming out very soon. Now that sync for Lemmy is here, so am I.
Or screenshots from Twitter/Reddit
Same, regardless of the “BuT iTs nOt FoSs” cries. You are free to use whatever app you want.
I definitely prefer FOSS, but hey if it gets you on the fedi, go for it.
One thing that worries me about Foss is the eventual lack of updates and potentially become abandonware. Many people mentioned that the Foss apps protects are a side project for most developers. They could easily lose interest or have other things happen in their life that take up more of their time.
These arguments are valid for closed source as well I agree, but this being the devs main focus makes me feel better about updates in the long term.
I mean the opposite can be said as well. Since open source apps are, well, open source, if the developer abandons them, someone else can pick up where thy left off, but that’s not the case with the closed source apps.
Although the developer being paid to make the app can often make it higher quality.
Very good point as well.
It ain’t FOSS but it’s totally BOSS.
.## NoFussNoFOSS
Sync is doing fine but I honestly don’t understand the hype.
There is a dozen apps out there since the reddit migration with some having nearly the same features but without ads, without subscriptions and regular updates ever since.
Off the top of my head: Voyager, Summit, Connect, Thunder, Liftoff.
Honestly because IMO no other app compares to it in terms of polish, UX and smoothness; that’s not just out of lemmy apps either that’s phone apps in general.
And tbh that shouldn’t be too surprising, It’s got 10 years of development behind it and the Dev works on it full time—no other lemmy app has that.
The Wikipedia app comes dangerously close believe it or not.
I keep hearing people mention all of these apps, and I’ve tried most of them (I’m on Android, and besides Sync, I currently have Liftoff, Connect and Thunder installed; I had Jerboa and the Voyager PWA, but removed the former fuel to bugs and the latter due to slow startup).
Honestly, none of them feel as polished as Sync. They do offer pretty much the same functionality, sometimes even better, but the UI and UX of Sync is just smoother.
Maybe it’s just that I’m used to Sync after using it for reddit for many years, but in any case I thought I’d put this out there in case others were feeling puzzled as I was from all the mentions of other apps suggesting they can replace Sync without any quality loss. Sure, maybe not functionality-wise, but to me the user experience is just as important.
Thanks for this, it’s really helpful. Confirms that the Sync interface just feels right to me.
It may be the 11 years of using it on Reddit, but Sync already works how I expect it to. Just things like hitting the preview takes you to the link instead of the comments, or how tapping the community name on a link takes you to the community. Every other app just doesn’t behave as intuitively or efficiently.
Every single one of those apps except Summit and Voyager have janky scrolling, which is easy to notice on a 90Hz screen.
Sync has not dropped a single frame since my install on all my devices.
And every one of them has just one tiny annoyance I can’t let go.
E.g.
Connect: only left hand voting. I use my phone almost always in one hand and it’s my right hand.
Liftoff: no auto-hide the bottom (quite big) bar.
Summit: post actions only available when in the post. (Like save or share.)So stuff like this. They are not the end of the world, but y’know: better without them.
And the stutter on most of them. Annoying as hell.
Interestingly I quit using Voyager because the scrolling wasn’t high frame rate, but maybe that was because I was using it on Firefox? Thunder is smooth for me.
Yeah that’s a Firefox issue, you need to enforce 90Hz on Firefox using adb to make it work
For me it’s the force of habit. I’m already used to the UI, I know where everything is, what to expect, I can navigate it very quickly and set it exactly how I want. All the features I’m used to like comment drafts or the comment navigation bar (jump between top-level comments easily) are right where I’m used to.
It’s also very polished, for example I encountered two issues with Connect:
-
it didn’t handle internet dropping out (e.g. temporary loss of mobile signal) well - it just kept failing on the retry button even after connectivity was restored, had to restart it
-
the search in the sidebar didn’t show all the matching communities
-
In terms of smoothness- 90hz screen only voyager and summit has that
Sync is already the most visually and ergonomically polished by far. That’s not all that matters, but it’s very important for me and many others.
Came here to say, memmy is crazy good and the developer is dropping revs faster than people can post bugs.
thunder is better than sync idk what everyone likes about sync just seems like a copy of all the other apps except they have to groundwork for ads and monetization
how revolutionary
Sync for Reddit was around for a long time, about 10 years. It came out before the official Reddit app, which on release had a design that was heavily influenced by Sync at the time, and still to this day has some design elements it took from Sync.
Sync for Lemmy may be a “new” app, but it inherited almost everything from Sync for Reddit. If anything, others are copying Sync, not the other way around. What you see in sync for Lemmy is the result of about 10 years of development and refinement from the reddit days being ported over to work with Lemmy.
You guys have high requirements :)
But I agree, fantastic app. I think second best app is Liftoff though, it’s a bit cleaner since it doesn’t have a billion options.
Sync is like the professional choice in clients
Maybe I’m alone facing this, but I tried a few apps and the website itself - I was finding the interface very unintuitive and confusing
It has sooo many options, it could be a good idea to hide some of them behind an Advanced menu. That way the user interface still looks clean but power users can customize.
I think that would help a lot
Sync is great. Lemmy is still lacking content. Shows I watch, bands, etc… those communities have no activity (if they even exist).
Be the change you want to see.
I gave up on making community content once I lost all my data when Vlemmy died. I know I’m a part of the problem, but it burned me out
There needs to be 100 times the people for any change to manifest. No matter how hard you try, you won’t be able to convince tens of thousands of people to switch.
Same as Reddit in the beginning, Digg was so strong back in the day.
It will take years before you see more niche communities like that.
I was using wefwef.app and liked the colored bars on the left when several users replied to each other. Now in sync these bars are the same color. Can I change this?
yes
You can link to settings?!
yes, hold down any switch or setting to get a sync-settings:// link in your clipboard to post, which is then clickable when in the app.
What a fantastic feature, never saw that in Sync for Reddit.
it was there but very rarely used, even on r/syncforreddit
this is the coolest thing i ever saw
Damn, I forgot this was a think in Sync for reddit. Just bought the ads removal even though I cannot see any ads anyhow. The dev deserves it.
The app is beautiful. Former rif user and decided to give Sync for Lemmy a try and I’m not disappointed.
This is my first post too! :)
Now you are counted as an active user on Lemmy. :)
In the couple months since I’ve been a Redditfugee, I had decided that Liftoff was the way to go. It still is, using it for this very post. Sync is down right now (traffic?), but so far it’s houses ahead of any of the other apps for Lemmy I use like Thunder and Connect and yeah, Liftoff. I use the stacked(?) view so I don’t see any ads
Sync isn’t down, Lemmy.world is receiving heavier than normal traffic, because of sync. If you switch to a different instance, you don’t get the warning popup.
Sync for Reddit users are now getting damn near the same exact experience here, that they were on reddit. Same UI we’ve been used to for years, and Lemmy content is easier to navigate through, and it opens you up to browse the instances version of r/all instead of just what you’re subscribed to.
The search is nice too, because the couple things I looked for as far as ‘subs’ go, I’ve found multiples across different instances, each with a different variety of content.
App developers probably don’t understand what federation means if they’re all putting traffic at lemmy.world.
That’s just the default, and I assume it’s mainly to make it easier for new users to start using Lemmy. It lets you change to any other instance during login.
Yeah, I’ve tested the app out. But the problem is that people who don’t know any better (which almost none of new people do, me included when I was new) will just use the default. Which is down a lot. This causes two things:
- forces lemmy.world to upgrade its hardware all the time
- discourages new users from trying Lemmy because it doesn’t work
Getting a list of some instances (that are not as overcrowded) and assigning one at random by default would be the best way to go about it.
I’ve been chatting with the lemmy.world admins and specifically asked if pointing at the default was fine.
I mean, it’s obviously fine for them (the problems will probably get stable after some time and they gain more users in the process), but it’s not good for Lemmy overall and not for new users.
Honestly I think having a default one is necessary for users to put their trust in the service. If there’s no lemmy.world, another server will become the go to (it used to be lemmy.ml before world). People want to have their account on the instance all their friends have it on so that they’d never be alone in losing their account or the service being offline for them. And the bigger the instance, the more trustworthy it seems.
Lemmy.world has also been a tremendous help in debugging performance issues due to necessity.
Honestly I think having a default one is necessary for users to put their trust in the service
As I said:
Getting a list of some instances (that are not as overcrowded) and assigning one at random by default would be the best way to go about it.
People want to have their account on the instance all their friends have it on so that they’d never be alone in losing their account or the service being offline for them
That… doesn’t make sense.
Fediverse drama being what it is, though, that’d probable involve the dev in all sorts of arguments and debates he’d rather not touch with a ten foot pole
Possibly, but if you want to get paid more, maybe your app shouldn’t expose “lemmy.world is having issues” as one of the first things new people see.
Honestly sync has the little things I was hoping for.
Does anyone know if we’re going to get the “Sync” feature back?
I really miss my offline reading.
I was just wondering yesterday whether the name still fits.
Amazing app. Hopefully kbin support arrives soon.
I’ve been using lemm.ee but this is a million times more enjoyable. I purchased Reddit Sync for Android years ago but I’m going to give the free version a spin and see about subscribing.
Sooooooo good.
how did you forward a link to a setting? what magic is this?
This is honestly a great experience, the app has integrated with my instance perfectly. Impressive work!
