I don’t understand the people hating on Sync just as much as I don’t understand the people hating posts criticizing sync.
It’s an app. Let people use what they want to use lmao. Growth for Lemmy is a good thing regardless
As a former Reddit user of sync pro. I’m one of those people who just enjoys the UI so much that I’m willing to support the dev. It’s easy to say “pay for it” to make it look worse, but I appreciate the work he’s put into it.
I agree, there is nothing wrong with getting paid for your work. It is a high quality app which should be appreciated by the lemmy community since it helps them grow.
I legitimately could not get into Lemmy with any of the other apps. They just all felt wrong.
But I used Lemmy more on the first day the app came out than I did since I made my account two months ago. Best part is it feels just like Sync for Reddit did, including all the great features.
The only reason I haven’t paid yet for no ads is that I’m waiting to see how much I like it. I might even pay for Ultra if they provide a discount for buying it with the Reddit app.
I’m using it right now. Working just fine so far, exactly the same as the reddit version, and I haven’t been asked to pay $20 for it.
It’s $20 to remove ads permanently. You can still use it for free with ads. For me I see a small box ad every 20 or so posts. I don’t personally find it intrusive. I plan to pay for one of the high polish apps after a few more come out and I find the one I like best. $20 once is completely worth it for the value I get out of it.
I think it may be a bug, but I have not seen a single ad so far. There’s not even a spot for ads to appear. I had Sync Pro on Reddit so it has been the exact same experience I had on that
maybe it detect reddit sync pro?
It would be awesome if it did haha, I paid $2 for Sync way back in 2014 and used it nonstop, but I think that I’ve seen that Sync for Lemmy was going to be, for all intents and purposes, entirely separated from Sync for Refdit
Even if you don’t find it intrusive, it is. Ads are incredibly powerful, that’s why they pay good money to get them in front of you through any means possible.
Okay, but I’m not paying either and all I see every ~20 posts is a black box that literally just says “Sponsored Content”?
Is mine bugged or do the ads on the app kick in later, lol? Because right now it’s awesome.
I’ve getting the same black box with “Sponsored Content”.
I havent paid and haven’t even seen anything but content so far. Not even the black boxes
A month from now you are going to look around and think to yourself, “damn, why did I buy so much of this sponsored content? I don’t need this much sponsored content”
Connect seems good enough to me
The ads aren’t even working yet lol it’s still in beta. I don’t get why everyone is complaining.
People complaining seem to be in 2 camps:
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This is not FOSS and thus is bad.
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The pricing is too expensive.
For either case people are free to not use the app. Surely the existence of an app that makes the Lemmy experience so much better is a good thing. This grows the Lemmy universe.
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I got my first ads today… Crap shop “Temu”… Lovely
TEMU can DIAF
That an app would even consider ads is offensive. Pay or don’t use? Fine. But offer an ads tier? Hell no.
I thought I was taking crazy pills. I haven’t seen a single ad yet and was wondering why everyone is bitching.
Dude, there are literally boxes that say “sponsored content” I find those annoying enough, but you don’t think those are going to switch to ads soon? I’ve always wondered who bought those houses on the California cliffs that were definitely going to erode into the ocean at some point. I’m getting a better idea.
I may be outing an oversight but list view doesn’t show those boxes. I see what you’re talking about in the card view, however.
Boomer mentality, no thinking of the future.
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infinity for lemmy is out posting this from infinity.
Infinity is better, dev has done a really good job porting this to lemmy. I feel the lemmy version is even smoother than the reddit one
Wow, thanks for the good news! I heard the dev wasn’t very happy to redo infinity for lemmy but this change things. Great.
A different dev has forked it, not the same dev as infinity for reddit.
well I’m testing like 5 6 apps for lemmy rn. I’ll settle with one maybe after a year or two when everything settles down. rn I’ll say sync ui is fluid and rich but still incomplete. infinity felt better than reddit client which I’ll completely agree with you.
Yeah sync is better of all right now without a doubt but I’m still keeping all 7 of them. Lemming seems to be gone from github.
i just tested these apps and I’ll say connect works really better for replying to comments. all those apps just showed me what was the reply not the parent thread. which is quite frustrating also.
Edit: tested this on summit also works really good for context rest of those apps need to improve inbox section. without context i can’t just reply to a comment.
You sir, are an absolute legend for informing me of this.
Infinity Gang Rise Up
Really don’t get what all the fuss regarding Sync is about. There are plenty of alternatives out there, free or not. Maybe someone can explain what I’m missing?
Closed source app for an open source social media platform, and monetizing a free + open source social media platform with subscriptions and ads would be my guess. Of course we all have the choice not to use it. Infinity seems pretty good to me so far.
No idea. It’s a better app than the open ones. Don’t like it? Don’t use it. How does this stuff get up voted so much?
The way I see it, FOSS is like a public option. It’s very important to provide a baseline functionally that paid apps need to exceed to be competitive. That’s a great thing, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong for paid apps to exist that provide a more polished experience, and if you can’t afford it, the ads really aren’t that intrusive, but if they annoy too much you can just use FOSS.
What’s great about Lenny is that this choice cannot be taken away from us. There will always be competition both FOSS and paid because lemmy is an open platform and healthy competition is a great thing.
People have a hate boner for non-FOSS. There are no other high quality Lemmy apps. Choice is only an illusion. Now go to the app store and download your mandatory Sync app /s
People on the internet tend to latch onto memes for the hell of it. Do they really care about it? Probably not. It’s just the topic of the week, like X, Threads, the Titanic, etc. I would hope that people would be a lot less harsh to the Sync developer…I doubt that the people fanning the anti-Sync flames are doing it to try and lower prices.
I think it was one of the most popular reddit third-party apps so everyone is excited for the Lemmy version but I have never used it
I’m just happy we have all of these choices.
The FOSS apps are fantastic already and Sync is there if you want that too.
Yeah let’s just support Lemmy developers maybe?
Supporting your app dev, lemmy devs, and your instance owner are all good.
Obviously, don’t stretch yourself too thin out of obligation either.
Based neutral take
Where are my Sicko’s running at least 3 apps like toddlers in a cage match.
Had my money on Liftoff, but Sync just dropped into the Hell in a Cell playpen and it’s time to rumble.
I should update Jerboa probably
I have 8 apps just to see which has the best UI, UX, and updates. Sync is still a personal preference of mine, but the 20 bucks is a bit much.
I was using Jerboa but it quit working right about a week ago. I’ve updated it from F-Droid but it’s still jacked up. Infinity seems good though.
I have wef wed jerboa liftoff connect and now sync. Maybe I should delete a couple
Perhaps lemmy admins should start charging apps like this for API access…
The intent is to provide developers with a sense of pride and accomplishment for being able to pay the API bill.
I think he was being sarcastic
itt: ideas to kill lemmy
This meme is dumb. There are more options than just the web ui and sync, most are free.
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I think the bigger issue is that you can’t afford a $20 one time fee for a highly polished app that will get a massive amount of usage. I know it’s a tough economy but $20 isn’t a crazy amount of money.
Here’s the thing. I don’t know if it will get a massive amount of usage. Lemmy is fine right now but not having the userbase that reddit has is brutal. I want to talk sports with people but all the sports communities are dead. If I look at an Orioles community the game threads have 12 comments all by bots giving pitching/scoring updates.
Give it time. What’s important is that lemmy has hit critical mass and has many great clients that are far better than the Reddit ones. It will grow and not shrink. It’s the long game, doesn’t matter that it’s not big enough to support sports communities yet, it will get there and it’s still very early days on this platform.
Lemmy is already significantly more active than when I first joined, and that was only 2 months ago.
It’s so weird how it DOES seem expensive for an app feature. But like you said in the grand scheme it’s actually incredibly cheap. It’s a meal at McDs!
A lot of apps charge money for barely anything at all, but in sync’s case, think how much you use the app. I expect to get a ton of value out of lemmy clients.
The most I’ve ever paid for an app is $15 for a highly-featured launcher that is now literally the core element of my phone use. This pricing just does not make sense when compared to the rest of the Android ecosystem.
Additionally, I don’t know if I would call it “highly polished.” I’d say it looks fine and browsing feels, well, like browsing, but I used it for a couple days and comments seemed to be totally bugged. They were appearing out of order, disappearing seemingly randomly and I think some where even attaching to the wrong parents, because there were things I was reading that just didn’t make any sense.
It’s 22€ (24.50 USD) here. To the commenter who said that’s “one MacDonald,'s meal”, every single large McMenu here is under 10€. With the usual coupons, you’re looking at the cost of McDonald’s for my entire family, not just one meal.
I can still, comfortably, afford blowing that much money on an app. But it doesn’t even get me any of the many “Ultra” features (that’s 110€). Looking at the Ultra page, ljdawson has already made clear that almost all planned Lemmy quality of life features will be pay-gated.
It’s also a huge gamble: we have no idea how financially viable Sync will be in a much smaller and far more hostile to non-FOSS apps, community. Heck, I opted out of tracking (like most EU-members of Lemmy would have) and the app isn’t even loading any ads at all, the revenue generated for ljdawson is zero.
Ljdawson has already suspended development of the original Reddit client on at least one occasion even though it was massively successful. Don’t think for a second he won’t cut his losses and run if he doesn’t consider the Lemmy client a financial success. The “lifetime” purchase might buy you another 10 years of maintained and polished usage, it might buy you six months. It’s a gamble.
Instead of blowing the cost of a small (McDonald’s) or a large (Amusement Park) family outing on my second-favorite former Reddit client, I’m waiting for Boost to come out, with hopefully slightly more sensible pricing.
I reckon since he mentioned the lack of regional pricing, he’s probably from a developing country where 20 USD is a crazy amount of money for a Lemmy app. Whatever “side” you’re on, I think regional pricing is an extremely reasonable request.
“highly polished”
it is more than 20 for me
Voyager won me
I was using it but switched to sync. It just seems so much better to me. I assume a lot of it has to do with familiarity, but man the UX just seems so tight to me too.
Just here waiting for boost for lemmy!
Infinity for Lemmy <3
Infinity for Lemmy <3
Voyager is free and the pwa feels close to a native app.
Voyager just started their TestFlight app version a few days ago and it’s really great (on iOS.) It added haptic feedback which is very nice, and fixes the freezing issue. Otherwise it’s identical, I think. I’d guess there will be an android app sometime.
I’m also testing Memmy and using Mlem - both are coming along great, but Voyager app version is the cleanest and my favorite atm.
Looking forward to trying Sync when it comes to iOS. Never tried it for Reddit - only used Apollo.
How can I get it on Testflight? I am using Mlem currently and tried Memmy a bit. For now I look at Mlem as my Lemmy-app, because the comments are well formatted compared to Memmy, but Memmy is Open Source and has definetly the the better Icon. Yes, such things are important for me, too.
Voyager TestFlight link: https://testflight.apple.com/join/nWLw1MBM
I joined early on, so it may be full like they often are. If it is, bookmark and keep checking - especially during off hours.
Thx, I got it. (:
I quite like Voyager. Works really well
And if you’re on Android, the free apps that fully function are…
Liftoff (amazing)
Thunder (amazing)
Connect (great, but not sure if it’s open source?)
Summit
Nemmy
Beyond (tried it and didn’t like that it defaults to Lemmy.ml)
Lemmitof (haven’t tried yet)
There’s acyually an APK version for android as well of Voyager.
Are you sure it’s legit? From a quick look at the official GitHub repo’s README, I saw no mention of a native Android app (however I did see mention of the iOS app).
EDIT: dug a little deeper and saw mention of the Android app in the latest release notes (beta coming soon to the play store) as well as an empty Android studio project folder in the source. Maybe the actual code is somewhere on a different branch, but even so, I would be hesitant to install random APKs not coming from the developer themself.
Here it is on the google play store: https://lemmy.world/post/2613340
Damn, the Voyager dev works fast! Thanks for the link.
Fuck PWA. I want a native, fast app with no JavaScript.
It’s fast and it’s about as native as most apps get nowadays. Kotlin on Android or Swift on iOS still run in virtual machines with GC not unlike Javascript. Nobody writes apps in C++ either. Maybe one day we will do it in Rust when there’s ever a good mobile GUI framework.
Also by fast I do mean fast. Much better than any other PWA or website I’ve ever used and on par with good native apps. There do be some bugs, I’ve run into two and they’re a bit annoying, but I’m sure they’ll be fixed soon enough. The dev is super active and it’s open source so anyone can contribute.
Much of the time you can’t really tell it’s not Apollo and that was the best reddit app hands down.
I do have a recent iPhone though. Maybe an older or lower end phone won’t be as fast. But even so, I would still recommend trying it.
Your argument for "as native as most apps” falls apart pretty quickly though.
I’m not saying it’s a bad app. I’m just saying it’s a badly made app, because JavaScript was a joke 30 years ago, it’s a joke today. (ThePrimeagen)
Most apps aren’t native, so being “as native” as the baseline average or better isn’t even saying much at all. They’re all using V8, and I’m slightly less disgruntled if they use something like React Native or whatever instead of Vue and virtual DOM stuff. This was brief but you get the idea.
Also, Xamarin and Flutter/Skia do exist.
React native, Xamarin, Flutter aren’t REALLY native either. Neither are, like I said, the main languages either mobile platform’s owner wants you to use.
Mobile apps are rarely native for real these days.
Voyager uses React so it uses the Virtual DOM much like Vue (which often tends to be faster) or React Native. I can’t see how using React Native instead of React like you suggested is all that much better. It’s all the same shit.
You want native, there’s Dioxus for Rust or I guess QT for C++. Those will compile into actual binaries rather than some sort of bytecode running in an interpreter. But these take much more time to write complex apps in and in a world where we want all our apps to be free, they’re hard to justify.
It’s interesting you quote ThePrimeagen about Javascript, because it’s literally the main language he uses/used at Netflix and he often says it’s not a bad language. He’s got a workshop on Javascript coming in November.
I hate the language as much as any and have avoided using it professionally, but your arguments are pretty weak. Modern Javascript engines are ridiculously fast, which is why a WELL MADE web app can be much faster than a shoddily made “native” app.
Edit: It’s now available on the app store, making it native by your definition. Which is to say it has direct access to some system APIs, but it still renders a vDOM like any other react native app.
