Recently hopped over to Lemmy from Reddit, initially tried Boost and the web app and wasn’t super happy with the experience however after installing Singing I can happily say the experience has improved vastly. It feels more promising and premium than the actual official Reddit app!
As much as I love Voyager, I’m a compact post list kind of guy. And nothing beats Sync’s post density and configurability.
All I need is a title, the community it’s on, # of comments, and a small thumbnail. If I need anything else, I’ll click on the post.
Why would I want an up/down vote button on a compact list? Who upvotes something just from the title??
Other than hiding vote buttons, is there anything in particular that you’re looking for from Voyager’s compact mode?
If you can make an issue on Github that would help too!
Edit: you can hide vote buttons in compact mode :)
Oh hey. Wasn’t expecting you to pop up! Yeah, sorry, my rant wasn’t specific to Voyager (in fact, thank you for being one of the few allowing hiding vote buttons). I actually use Voyager on my larger devices.
On my tiny phone though, a few things stand out:
- Large padding between posts. Should probably scale with font size (or let users specify)
- Smallest font size could be smaller.
- No way to hide top & bottom bar (Sync hides them on scroll)
Might dump then on GitHub when I have the time. But if someone else redding this has the free time, feel free to do so :)
You must be kidding me. Voyager is a joke compared to Sync.
- Voyager has horrible micro stuttering when trying to scroll. Especially when scrolling posts, but I’ve seen it on comments too. Whether flick panning or slowly scrolling down. And I have a blazing fast phone. (Pixel 7 Pro). Sync is buttery smooth. I don’t think Voyager is a native Android app.
- Compact mode is super cluttered and hard to read.
- It’s numbericonnumbericonnumbericon all squished together. Sync uses the same amount of space in it’s compact mode and makes everything clear.
- For some reason you can use the normal, large voting buttons, or click on the microscopic vote totals to vote. I’m trying to view the comments, but I vote on a post instead.
- The three-dot icon is 1/6th the width of my pinky nail, and I have a giant phone! Why is it so tiny?
- There’s no way to quickly peek at a large version of a thumbnail on a link post. You can open the comments to larger version, though. Sync let’s you long press a thumbnail to peek at it full screen. It turns out I use this feature a lot and don’t want to wait for comments to load to look closely at a link thumbnail.
- The three-dot menu on a post doesn’t have 1/2 the features of Sync’s menu. Sync shows additional submenus for the user and community for blocking, viewing their home instance, their profile, and other things.
- You can’t disable swiping an image to close it causing me to dismiss images by accident. Sync had a setting to disable this. I prefer to use only the Android back button to close an image.
- Sync has a million settings to customize everything, and long-pressing a setting will copy a shortcut which you can share with other Sync users to help them jump right to that setting with one tap. The settings shortcuts, when pasted into a comment, appear as graphics to other Sync users showing the setting name and making it obvious it’s a shortcut to it.
- In Sync, the top and bottom bars hide when scrolling and reappear if you scroll back up a small amount, saving screen real estate.
- Sync has a comment draft system so you can save a comment to work on later. It’s great for high effort comments. It also automatically saves a draft the instant you try to post something in case the submission fails for any reason, and deletes the draft automatically if it submits successfully.
- Sync has built-in filters. You can choose to save a client-side filter for a user, community, or instance, or create a server-side block.
And you can create keyword filters allowing you to filter stuff like Elon Musk spam.Never mind, I found that in Voyager. - Sync has special options for tablets and other widescreen devices.
- Sync can edit your core Lemmy account options so you don’t need to use the website to do that.
- Sync’s comment navigator goes both down and up and has other features, too. Voyager’s only jumps down to the next comment.
- Voyager doesn’t seem to preload thumbnails. I live in the boonies, and even if I sit and read a headline for a minute before scrolling, I get blank thumbnails that I have to wait for as soon as I scroll again.
- Sync loads a ton of them ahead of time and I almost never see them load at normal scrolling speeds.
- It appears to be even worse than that! It seems Voyager is loading the full images for thumbnails in compact mode! Thumbnails for large images take forever to load. I can literally watch them load one row of pixels at a time, but when I tap them, the full image loads instantly. WTF? It’s because the thumbnail was the large image.
- Voyager has absolutely no warning if you hit Back by accident when writing a comment. Sync will prompt you to discard the comment or save a draft.
- In Voyager if I “share” a post and open it in a web browser, it doesn’t spawn the browser process correctly. It opens the browser as a child process, so I see the browser in my recent apps list with the Voyager icon, and Voyager itself is nowhere to be seen. I have to press the Back button (sometimes repeatedly) from the browser to get back to Voyager. Sync shares the link to your browser the normal way and both apps appear in the recent apps list.
- Voyager doesn’t support Lemmy spoiler tags at all. Let me try one:
Warning text
This is the actual spoiler
Nope, doesn’t work at all! Sync does stupid things with spoilers which I mention below, but at least it works!
Nor does Voyager support the markdown for horizontal rules (horizontal lines used to separate content). It works fine on the website and in Sync. There should be one right here:
Even worse, it removes my dashes and displays nothing!
I could go on and on. I keep finding more and more issues and shortcomings with Voyager.
That’s not to say Sync is perfect.
- Sync uses reddit style markdown instead of Lemmy style in some cases, and only other Sync users see the formatting properly. Superscript and spoilers, specifically, are done wrong, and subscript isn’t supported at all. That’s dumb. You can type the markdown manually, but it will change Lemmy style spoiler tags to reddit style when you edit a comment containing a Lemmy style spoiler! WTF! This is because for spoilers to work at all, it converts them all to reddit style when it loads the comment. I’m assuming this is because the dev was too lazy to change the code to work with Lemmy style spoilers and kept the spoiler code from the old Sync for Reddit app. Honestly, I prefer the reddit style, but an app made for Lemmy should support Lemmy style!
- The app appears to be abandoned. The author hasn’t said a thing on the Discord in 4 months. Some apologists say this is “normal” for him, but it’s bullshit behavior to not say anything. Maybe he died or is in jail. Who knows. But there is a huge backlog of bugs.
- It has ads unless you pay $20. Considering how good the app is overall, it’s almost worth it, but to a lot of people it won’t be. Especially considering point #2.
- It’s not FOSS, so if #2 is really true, the app is dead. It’s a one-man team. No one else can pick up the reigns.
I don’t really care what app people prefer, but Sync is like Photoshop compared to Voyager’s Paint.Net. I’m curious to see what objective things you could say about Voyager to make it seem superior. Even just in your own opinion.
This comment was written in Voyager because I’ve been trying to give it a chance.
Hi thanks for the write up!
-
This doesn’t happen on iOS, but should get more investigation
-
I think this is a matter of opinion. I personally prefer the Voyager compact mode. But I am biased. ;) You can tap and hold to get to the ellipse menu. You can also disable the large vote buttons in settings for more tap space.
-
You can block, view side bar etc by tap and hold on username/community name.
-
I don’t think this has been requested yet as a feature on Github.
-
That’s cool
7 Planned :)
- Voyager has recovery in case of app crash, but doesn’t have a draft system.
10 planned but not yet :)
12, you can tap and hold to jump back up.
14, you should see a warning if you hit back by accident. If the comment is empty there is no warning because there is nothing composed.
15, you can set Voyager to open links in browser, instead of in-app
16, this is being worked on :)
Regarding #15. In didn’t tap a link in Voyager. I tapped “Share” and then chose the DuckDuckGo browser as the share target for the URL. I do this occasionally since it’s not my default browser and I use it for throwaway links I don’t want to clutter Firefox with.
In every other app, not just Lemmy ones, it simply opens the browser as a new process and loads the URL. On the other hand, Voyager some how opens the browser as Voyager. When opening the recent apps list, I no longer see Voyager. I only see DuckDuckGo with the Voyager icon above it.
Once the page is open, if I tap into a link on the page, then another, then another, I know have to hit Back 3 times to get back to Voyager.
No other app does this.
Not being able to use sync was why I left Reddit. And I won’t be going back.
I’ve been using sync until now, but recently I discovered Summit and now is my first app for lemmy
I actually swapped from Sync to Boost but it’s likely a matter of what you’re used to. I used Boost on Reddit so everything is familiar. For what it’s worth, I think Sync & Connect are also great options
I appreciate all the devs on here! I wouldn’t be using Lemmy this much without them
It’s a nice but expensive app. I’m not going to pay what they’re asking to get the full experience, they’re just not worth it when so many other apps are available.
