I’m desktop-only user and never had any experience with Reddit/Lemmy apps, and the sentiment towards them confuzes me.
I can imagine that the third-party apps for Reddit were better (?not bugged?) than the official one. But what made you to love them? Was the experience even better than desktop use?
Feel free to write about both Reddit and Lemmy apps in your responses.
Recall that 3rd party mobile apps came before the official Reddit Mobile app. For many people, especially Reddit’s oldest users, their 3rd party app was Reddit for them.
Exactly. On the very rare occasion I needed to hop on desktop, it felt like a totally different place. I didn’t use Reddit. I used RiF.
I would say a good mobile client’s user experience is indeed better than desktop. Desktop websites are second class citizens in this day and age.
As a mainly desktop user I agree. Nearly everything is designed/built around portrait mode nowadays, and landscape is merely a secondary concern… if at all. Understandable considering a lot of traffic is from mobile, but it can make things feel a bit clunky and fit poorly on a wide screen.
For me I found the new Reddit desktop site completely unusable. I hated everything about it. On desktop I used old.reddit with RES.
On mobile their 1st party app was similarly shitty like their new desktop ui. The 3rd party apps were much better but I didn’t necessarily prefer then over the old+RES desktop website.
Main reason I also used mobile apps was that I could browse Reddit while taking a shit.
Yeah, it was and is a lot easier than desktop usage. I am lying in bed right now typing this with my phone while my desktop is playing YouTube videos. I am too lazy to pick up my keyboard and type this out.
I tried out the Reddit app for a few days during the protests, and it just fucking sucked. It was slow, buggy, and not customizable. Even in dark mode, it was too bright and gaudy for my tastes. And I had to install extra software to disable ads.
I used RiF, which was a bit like a more mature Jerboa with some features like swipe to hide posts, built-in username switching, saving post/comment drafts, and well-done integrations for embedded images and webpage links. Links I click in Jerboa currently appear in my browser history, whereas RiF opened up its own browser. Hopefully, Jerboa will add a WebView option.
More importantly, I felt like Rif was text based, as any Reddit client should be. The Reddit app uses icons where RiF would use a text field. As someone who has put in the time to learn how to read, and used that skill continuously for over two decades, it is annoying to have to freshly learn an app’s specific, increasingly abstract icons when we already have the ability to read text.
I came to Reddit for the in-depth text posts and comments. The meme communities were a nice side thing, but I was really there for the long posts, and to dump long posts of my own.
IMO, the standard Lemmy web app has more features implemented than Jerboa right now. However, I want to keep my Lemmy/Reddit history separate from my ordinary browsing. For both sites, the app allows my browser not to get cluttered with Reddit links. Jerboa currently opens up a canned tab of one of my browsers, but the browser doesn’t get info about every post I open on Lemmy, so it still does have a great deal of utility.
IMO Lemmy is really well designed from the ground up. The web app is pretty good, but I would simply rather not use it in my browser if I don’t have to.
Apparently, Reddit’s app and web interface were additionally inaccessible for blind people to use, so they resorted to 3rd party apps (although I don’t think RiF was one of their typical choices). Reddit has allowed a few select non-commercial accessibility-focused apps to use their API for free, but I think that the status of serving NSFW content to these 3rd party apps is tenuous. The concern was that for all practical purposes, Reddit unilaterally decided that blind people could not interact with NSFW content. Now I just checked /r/gonewild, an established porn sub, and /r/erotic literature, a text-based erotica sub, on RedReader. So far, it is fetching new content for both subs. However, I have not checked any other apps (other than RiF, which is just completely dead) or subs. Anyone with more perspective on the current situation for blind users, please reply.
Lastly, I didn’t moderate any communities on Reddit, but apparently, moderating through the Reddit app or their modern interface sucked. Somehow, the 3rd party apps had much better tools than Reddit’s own app.
For me, RiF was the “frontpage of the internet”. I’ll miss it, but Lemmy has given me hope for the future of the internet for basically the first time in my life. Jerboa is currently the primary way that I access Lemmy, so I am rooting for it’s success, as well the other Lemmy apps and Kbin.
