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I do wonder why people are waiting and wanting these proprietary apps. Instead of using the open source ones more in the spirit of Lemmy and waiting for them to improve. These third party apps made sense for reddit since reddit was closed source and the official app was a pile of garbage whose only purpose was making people see as many ads as possible. But that's not true for Lemmy anymore, the official apps are already pretty nice and open source, so improvable by everyone (including Sync/Boost developers).
But I guess going from reddit to Lemmy is already a large break and people want to not have to change more than necessary. And Sync/Boost devs want to continue making money makes sense of course as well. I'm interested to see how all that goes.
because they are a lot more polished and feature complete. I come from boost, and use liftoff now, and I like it a lot, but there are still several things I don't like. I loved boost for its look and features, including the tons of settings that I set once and was perfect until the end.
I can only speak for myself here of course, but it doesn't matter to me if an app is open or closed source. What matters is having a nice experience. I am currently very happy with Liftoff and I didn't even know it was open source.
If another app comes along with new or better features, I will try it out and maybe even switch, regardless of whether it is closed or open source. And if they have an attractive pay model for interesting features, why not?
We need to see how it all plays out. What about the Lemmy instances themselves? Especially the larger ones need to make money too. Can they survive solely on donations like Wikipedia, or do they have to run ads at some point in the future?
Not everyone here loves or cares about open-source. Some just want a reddit-like experience without supporting Reddit or Spez.
The question is why don't you want to support reddit or spez? Because usually those reasons align pretty well with wanting to use free open source software.
I want to use a third party app and not the official app. I don't care if it's open-source, the official app just sucks.
If Spez is gonna be a cunt I'll use Lemmy.
I think people feel some sort of allegiance to the devs too. I loved boost when I was on reddit. It was a smooth, user friendly app. People compare stable boost/sync to unstable alpha lemmy apps. They don't realize that boost and sync will have growing pains too.
For me, it was how amazing Sync's navigation was. I found myself trying to use Sync's gestures in other apps--they're THAT intuitive and reliable. I'm honestly surprised Google or Apple haven't poached the developer to work on making the UIs of their built-in apps work more consistently.
For now wefwef is really good and does everything I need this type of app to do (mainly adjustable font sizes for my old man eyes with a minimalist interface which I prefer over the information overload that most seem to prefer, different strokes and all).
What are the open source one?
- Liftoff
- Mlem
- Wefwef, edit: it's Voyager now
- Jerboa
- Thunder
I'm not sure all of these are open source...
Well, you could be sure if you tried a bit of research!
I'm sure all of these are open source...
Well, you could be unsure if you did less research!
You're right. I jumped to the conclusion. Thanks for correcting me.
"Devs want to continue making money"
What's was the revenue stream with reddit? Was it all donation based or was it like a Boost/Boost Pro model.
Oh no, they made loads of money. I hate to quote spez the fuckwad: https://www.businessinsider.com/reddit-ceo-app-founders-apollo-riff-made-millions-using-api-2023-6?r=US&IR=T
No dev was talking against that, so i guess that point is correct.
Apollo made 500k a year alone from subscriptions, i have no clue what they've paid for the API prior though, but these guys are loaded.
The API for Reddit was free. I think for sites like Imgur, Redgifs, etc they paid some pretty reasonable fees. It's worth noting that many of them had revenue sharing agreements and trademark licenses with Reddit that were terminated after spez became CEO.
I'm not absolutely sure, but I think it was ad banners for free users and a possibility to remove ads with a one-time fee.
What's the offical Android app for Lemmy? I've only tried the web app on Lemmy.world which has a pretty awful UI.
Jerboa