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.
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’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.
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.
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
Same, regardless of the “BuT iTs nOt FoSs” cries. You are free to use whatever app you want.
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.
Sync is great. Lemmy is still lacking content. Shows I watch, bands, etc… those communities have no activity (if they even exist).
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.
Altho true someone has to be the first of those 100 people. Slowly but surely people will come
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.
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.
Funny comparison to make considering that these are Android apps, running on the Linux kernel.
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!
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.
Some of us have been using Sync for 10+ years, we’re not exactly looking for something new
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
