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
The hilarious thing is you can’t post from Sync yet, only comment, so for every post about Sync someone had to use their browser or another app to post it.
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.
I would say its mostly organic since a good amount of discussion is negative feedback about ads and the paid tiers.
I’d believe it’s organic tbh, I was waiting for Sync or Boost to drop before I fully took the plunge. There are probably many others like me for whom those apps and others defined the Reddit mobile experience and the other apps for Lemmy (or the ones I used at least) weren’t as feature rich so it’s an easy choice to make.
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.
There’s a golden ratio somewhere, it feels like Reddit has become overflown with posts and empty discussions, even on relatively niche subs. I could get behind a more sane approach to my web browsing habits but of course it will take some time.
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 they 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
today was the first time I forgot if I was browsing reddit or lemmy. its so good to be back on sync
I’ve still got revanced sync installed and I’m forgetting which one I have open occasionally, lmao
It feels good to be back to normal. Balance is restored.
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.
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.
Yes you will. It will just happen gradually over a couple years. No one is expecting this to happen overnight.
I am. LET’S GO! 🤣
We’re all here already, right?
Not at all! Just like with price, the difference between zero and one is hugely more consequential than any extra dollar added. Think of it: if you see a community with no posts in the last hour, or day, it does feel a bit deserted. Or a post without comments. By adding a post, or the first comment, you can be the difference for the next guy’s impression, and encourage them to do the same, and then the ball gets rolling, and that’s how you get momentum.
Niche communities start when the user ase grows quite a lot. Give it time.
My ass is pretty fat already. It doesn’t need any more growing.
Same as Reddit in the beginning, Digg was so strong back in the day.
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.
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 due 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.
Edit: for reference, here’s an album of screenshots comparing the same views in Sync, Liftoff, Connect and Thunder (yeah, I’m a fan of the compact list view): https://imgur.com/a/MvawTYm — there are pros and cons to all of these, but IMO the sync experience is the one with the best design and UX polish. Happy to hear your thoughts, though!
This x1000
I tried basically every app going on Android and they are all either buggy as fuck, unintuitive or janky in some other way. The user experience was just horrible.
I really do not understand all the people claiming Sync has an equivalent. It just does not right now in terms of a polished user experience.
Honestly it’s just Linux vs Windows kinda situation to me. No matter how many nerds tell me Linux can do everything the same and is more customisable and better, it’s just a worse user experience. Windows is far more intuitive and polished and there is a reason it has the market share it does.
Yeah, but I’m using Sync exactly because I’m using Linux lol. Much more convenient and polished, and there’s no such thing as intuitive UI, there’s only UI you got used to.
That’s not true. Intuitive UI design is absolutely a thing, and something people spend a lot of time, effort and money researching and implementing…
Funny comparison to make considering that these are Android apps, running on the Linux kernel.
The comparison serves only to highlight the importance of presentation and consistency. Those other apps might get there some day, but they’re not focused on a polished experience from the outset. Thats sync and it’s legacy. Experience and ease first. Honestly feels closer to an iOS app. And thats a very good thing.
I never said Linux isn’t capable of being the smoothest and most intuitive experience. Just that its not
I really wanted to stick with voyager, but just switching between inbox and posts was just a crap shoot. Sometimes it would switch, sometimes it was acting as a back button… Then you’d lose your scroll position in posts… Just very alpha feeling
That said I hope they keep going! Competition is always good!
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 currently
The Wikipedia app comes dangerously close believe it or not.
You know what, I’ll definitely agree with that
Some of us have been using Sync for 10+ years, we’re not exactly looking for something new
This is the case for me. I’ve seen more comments and posts than ever in Lemmy because of Sync
For real. Sync works incredibly well. The developer is responsive to the community. I know how to use it. I don’t want to learn a new app.
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.
Every single one of those apps except Summit and Voyager has 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.
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. Doing the Android “back” gesture from the left works like it should, I don’t have to confirm exit with a button, all these small things.
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, this seems to have improved recently
-
In terms of smoothness- 90hz screen only voyager and summit has that
It’s just how many of us are used to things. Particularly the collapsed comments along with rainbow colors depending on the nested comments. I’m sure one of those has it, but Sync has all my patterns. And it was as simple as importing my sync for reddit config to get all my options as they were. Worthwhile wait, and I don’t mind supporting a Dev. Especially when there is a one time ad-free payment option, which is all I need.
It didn’t even occur to me that the Sync for Reddit settings would import to Sync for Lemmy. That’s awesome! Thank you.
I like Thunder best
Came here to say, memmy is crazy good and the developer is dropping revs faster than people can post bugs.
Connect for me
deleted by creator
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.
My problem with Thunder is how inconsistent the Slide to go back vs. using the back button is. There’s a lot of inconsistency in the UI decisions.
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
old.lemmy.world should fix those woes.
I switched to Liftoff this week after Connect stopped letting me control my volume. My only complaint with is not being able to align post thumbnails to the left side of the screen. Other than that, I love the look and feel.
So you are the cause of the recent server problems!1!!
The app is beautiful. Former rif user and decided to give Sync for Lemmy a try and I’m not disappointed.
Same here
you should check out thunder i think sync is dog comparitively
all sync has going for it is a cluddered screen and ads no?
This is my first post too! :)
Now you are counted as an active user on Lemmy. :)
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.
This is honestly a great experience, the app has integrated with my instance perfectly. Impressive work!
Amazing app. Hopefully kbin support arrives soon.
From what I’ve read that all hinges on kbin making an API available for use first
Exactly this.
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 probably 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.
So what does sync do that lemmy on broswer doesn’t?
Aside from the polish, it’s also the familiar UX that many of us have used for a decade. It just feels familiar & right now!
Ehh ill give it a look. I generally avoid apps that are just a website.
Sync UI/UX are carried over from years of refinement as a Reddit client with full native controls. It now mostly just has a different API and service layer wired in for Lemmy. Definitely not a simple web view app.
Ill give it a look
It just adds ads that you can pay for to have it removed. Sync is piggybacking on the opensource devs.
You love paying for the trackers, I love the downvotes.
Cry more
I’m not crying. Just pointing out the hypocrisy of paying to get rid of ads on an (previously) ad-free platform. Pretty damn sure who to blame for that crap.
I’m all for people liking a certain UI/UX and supporting the dev but seriously, putting ads on fucking Lemmy? This is just so wrong
What’s the point on not using reddit’s mobile app then? I was using a 3PA because I couldn’t stand the ads and now comes someone to put ads on an app for Lemmy jfc
Exactly. And with it, it brought an army of ad-loving nuggets (from Reddit I’d say by the way they reply so defensive to me, just look at the downvotes).
If instead they could appreciate and donate some of their hard earned money to all the devs of those instances… Instead of getting rid of ads on an non-ad platform (yeah, that’s dumber than Trump).
I’m 99% sure this army has been bought by Stync to promote their app. They’re making 100$ of those subscriptions. An army like this doesn’t cost much in comparison.
A far more polished experience
Some people don’t like using desktop.
It’s a smother experience on mobile and more polished
Most of us are here because we used Sync for Reddit for years and want that familiar UX.
Honestly sync has the little things I was hoping for.
