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.
There's a golden ratio somewhere, it feels like Reddit has become overflown with posts and empty discussions, even on relatively niche subs. I could get behind a more sane approach to my web browsing habits but of course it will take some time.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
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
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.
It has sooo many options, it could be a good idea to hide some of them behind an Advanced menu. That way the user interface still looks clean but power users can customize.
I switched to Liftoff this week after Connect stopped letting me control my volume. My only complaint with is not being able to align post thumbnails to the left side of the screen. Other than that, I love the look and feel.
Personally I was a Boost fan and I'm excited for its release for lemmy. But I'm using sync in the meantime and absolutely loving it. There's a smoothness to this app, a refinement if you will that I couldn't find on any of the other apps. The level of customization to make my feed my own.
I've been jumping between Jerboa, liftoff and now sync. Sync just has a smoothness that the other two apps don't have, at least in my experience on my pixel 6 pro, scrolling and everything is butter smooth on sync, the others have some odd stutters sometimes
Totally on point.. Like you, I am a boost user, but the experience here in sync so far is the best regarding all other apps.. Either way, before this, I was using thunder nightly and so far so good.. Now, I'm waiting for boost to decide for which one I'm gonna go as premium user..
I was using wefwef.app and liked the colored bars on the left when several users replied to each other. Now in sync these bars are the same color. Can I change this?
I really wanted to just use the PWA, but Sync really is just so much better an experience right now. It's smooth, but it also doesn't lose my place in the feed every time I open a post. Trivial yet crucial!
Yeah it's pretty great. I've actually got to watch myself because I could see myself getting hooked in an unhealthy way like I did to reddit in the bad old days.
Same as you.. Although I'm jumping from sync to thunder every now an then, for me personally, the way comments looks on sync makes some visual noise, thunder in this regards looks better, but for every other thing, sync is apretty solid app..
I've been using lemm.ee but this is a million times more enjoyable. I purchased Reddit Sync for Android years ago but I'm going to give the free version a spin and see about subscribing.
For some reason all apps + web refuse to show me my comment people are replying to, even when pressing the "view context" button.
Sync does.
I don't know why all of the other apps + web decided to break on me a week ago, but the only way I can reply to comments right now is because of Sync. Anyone else having this issue?
I don’t know why all of the other apps + web decided to break on me a week ago, but the only way I can reply to comments right now is because of Sync. Anyone else having this issue?
There is an open issue on GitHub. 0.18.3 seems to have changed the behavior of comment links. IN some cases, the comment specified isn't even shown at all. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1999
In the couple months since I've been a Redditfugee, I had decided that Liftoff was the way to go. It still is, using it for this very post. Sync is down right now (traffic?), but so far it's houses ahead of any of the other apps for Lemmy I use like Thunder and Connect and yeah, Liftoff. I use the stacked(?) view so I don't see any ads
Sync isn't down, Lemmy.world is receiving heavier than normal traffic, because of sync. If you switch to a different instance, you don't get the warning popup.
Sync for Reddit users are now getting damn near the same exact experience here, that they were on reddit. Same UI we've been used to for years, and Lemmy content is easier to navigate through, and it opens you up to browse the instances version of r/all instead of just what you're subscribed to.
The search is nice too, because the couple things I looked for as far as 'subs' go, I've found multiples across different instances, each with a different variety of content.
I was so glad to see infinity for lemmy. I used infinity for reddit and that had a ui that both looked good and was intuitive. I was super excited to see that there was now a fork of it for use with lemmy.
No you don't have to pay at all actually. In fact people can choose to pay for something they love that works better than half the Lemmy apps I have already tried. I will pay for something that works.
Open source doesn't always mean you are any more safe either. I feel like this community thinks it knows more about security than it actually does.