Try Connect for Lemmy. It’s excellent.
I dont know man, I installed Liftoff as I want a consistent UI throughout iOS and Android and so far it’s great. Roll with whatever works for you 🤷♂️
Everyone is getting bent out of shape. Just use whatever app you like best. I have 5 apps installed that I’m testing including Sync.
That being said, my 2 cents regarding Sync: I don’t mind paying for a great app like Sync, but I’m not crazy about subscription models. I know there is a one time option but $100 for a mobile app is beyond nuts.
EDIT: $100 is for the lifetime “ultra” plan. It’s $20 to remove ads.
The gatekeeping is so fucked up
office_thank_you.jif!
We all ditch reddit because of how they screwed over 3rd party devs, and now one of the devs have worked overtime to create a similar UI* for this place, and now that dev is chopped liver. WTF?
*I’m just guessing on that part, because I didn’t try sync for reddit and I’m using the mobile web interface for lemmy for now, so I can’t really say.
Same UI! I love it
Am I missing something? What gatekeeping?
The fact that people shit on every proprietary software saying FOSS is better.
While FOSS is definitely good for the consumer. Proprietary is sometimes just better in function ¯\(ツ)/¯
Proprietary software deserves to be shat on since it doesn’t respect your freedom.
And this comment just shows that Foss shits all over our freedom to use whatever software we want.
Yeah not how it works.
All the people you find here fled from a proprietary platform that was abusing its position of power in order to profit off its users. While Sync for Lemmy is not in the same ballpark it nonetheless shares the same proprietary nature of reddit as it is a proprietary client that connects to a platform that is completely FOSS. So I believe it is entirely valid to campaign against the use of Sync for Lemmy and educate everyone about its dangers (loss of freedom, trust can’t be verified, abusive relationship)
The key detail you are missing is that most people that left reddit did so on the backs of closed source third party apps. That’s what kicked off the entire firestorm of events. The reality was that, of those who used third party apps, most used closed sourced solutions.
FOSS is great. FLOSS is even better. People should support projects they identify with, just like people should support their home Lemmy instance via community funding. But far too many of the argument I’m seeing against Sync and others basically boils down to “we shouldn’t pay for software,” like our [software engineer] labor is just something to be had for free.
Closed source third party apps are no threat to Lemmy. The failings of reddit cannot happen to Lemmy so long as one instance does not come to define Lemmy in such a way that they can self-isolate and essentially turn into a proprietary model itself. Let’s all recall that Reddit was, once upon a time, open source.
Third party apps are about choice. I hardly consider someone using a closed source third party app–in a sea of many, many FOSS versions–a loss of freedom or an abusive relationship. Come on, that’s very hyperbolic. And I’d wager 99% of people can’t verify that trust even if they wanted to since most people don’t understand code, let alone software development practices. They just take the word of random strangers whom they have no right trusting saying “yeah it looks good.”
People like to stick with what they know, and anyone who used Sync on Reddit will now be that much more inclined to give Lemmy a try because they get an interface that feels familiar. I can see this only benefiting the communities on Lemmy over time as the user base increases. Other popular apps like Boost coming to Lemmy would also draw in new users.
It’s great to have a base layer of free, good quality apps to accomplish some goal because it creates a very low barrier to entry. I keep F-Droid installed on my phone because there are times I need a very basic app to do something simple and the risk of malware is inherently lower in an app whose source is public vs private. I can check out the repository and take a look for myself if the permissions it requests are concerning.
That said, there are real advantages to a proprietary app. The developer has a financial incentive to keep the product up to date and add more features to maintain or increase the user base. This benefits not only paid users but also unpaid, ad-supported users.
Like you said, it’s about choice. If FOSS is important to you, go ahead and pick one of those clients. If you like snazzy new features or you want to stick with a client you’re familiar with, go ahead and do that. Nobody should be shamed or criticized for their choice either way.
I didn’t join Lemmy because of the ideology behind the project I joined it because I didn’t approve of what the owners of reddit were doing.
If the Sync dev starts ruining the app I’ll get a different one for the same reason I made a Lemmy account.
You’re confusing the platform with the app the platform used, not the same thing
How is this gatekeeping???
How is this gatekeeping???
“You aren’t welcome here if you aren’t FOSS.”
It’s pretty damn clear.The choice of a “teletubby” is obviously meant to be insulting too. If the point were that it was just different, they could have used practically any other hero from the same viewer demographic, instead they went with one only watched by “babies”, and almost universally understood to be “stupid”. Ask yourself “why did they choose a teletubby instead of a ninja turtle?”
sync has consistently worked for me (so far) whereas jerboa and voyager have had issues connecting to lemmy servers
Liftoff is pretty good. Has need a lot of updates in the time I’ve used it
Liftoff freaking rules. I can view /m/all, true ALL, not related to my instance, and I can comment on any post by having a few lemmy accounts (sopuli.xyz main, lemm.ee covers most everything else, plus beehaw).
Liftoff is the only one I know of that plays nice with multiple accounts and the whole fediverse
Voyager is still very new, though. I haven’t had that issue with Jerboa, but I use Liftoff more. I’m still trying out clients to see which is my favorite. It seems like there’s a new one coming out every week now!
Infinity for lemmy is the way to go
What, no Summit?
I was running most of them and added Sync - looked fine, but Connect / Voyager work fine for my personal taste, I’m just waiting for Infinity to come out with a full featured stable release. if dev wants to charge for no ads version or ultimate version, it is up to them, and up to the users if they are willing to pay them this. So, it all depends. I wouldn’t go ahead and attack them just because.
Since when is Sync claiming to be FOSS?
I think you misunderstood the meme
I have zero problems with jerboa, but I’ll give sync a try to see what everyone is so excited about.
Y’all sound real kool-aid, though.
Update 1: Not digging the bevels around every post, is there an option to disable that I haven’t found?
Update 2: I know it’s a small thing, but on a phone screen, that every-post bezel is making every post noticeably smaller. I’ma go back to jerboa and try sync again in a week or something after you crowd have hammered the dev with feedback.
Update 3: I don’t want the top and bottom bars snapping up and down with every swipe either, that’s gotta be an option right?
Peace out guys, and enjoy.
All of those can be changed in the settings. There are so many settings it can be difficult to find though.
This is a very neat QOL feature to have, nice detail
So uhhh… I see your comment as an answer to:
Sync isn’t FOSS. It’s just free.
Are you accidentally answered to wrong comment or is it lemmy/sync shows it wrong?
I love that you can do that
Wait, how can you do that??
Tap and hold a setting and it generates a link.
Holy shit I see them.
Sync has been around for a long time and has loads of customisations. If only you’d bothered to go through the settings before giving up, you’d have been able to make Sync your own.
In the side menu you can hit the 3 dots and open subscriptions in new windows. Another killer feature
deleted by creator
Click explore and you’ll see the communities. Then 3 dots should have an option to open in new window.
Appreciate it
Thanks for notifying that my favorite frontend app (for Reddit) is finally ready! Yeah, too bad it’s not FOSS…
Writing this comment from infinity
I am so happy to finally have Sync again. Was always my most used app before the API death on Reddit. Always happy to support LJ.
To be fair, this should be the other way around. All these foss apps are the teletubbies because they’re clunky and have major bugs. Sync is the power ranger.
To be fair they probably had most of the code ready, and just had to port it to Lemmy.
Major bugs? That’s not true at all, unless you mean “no tracking” is a bug?
You can’t hit backspace on jerboa without it mushing words together
There’s only crashalytics on sync. No tracking.
Very good.
There are tracking for ads for AdMob and Amazon, it’s the first part of the privacy policy
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.syncapps.lemmy_sync&hl=en_US
This app may share these data types with third parties
Personal info and Messages
That’s a deal breaker for me, no matter how good that app may be.
Connect is not broken that I’ve noticed after the first week or so.
Nah
Yeah I’ve used all the apps in this post and Sync is just light years ahead of all of them right now. Well worth the 19$ to remove the ads
Kinda shitty to hate on Sync like this for not being foss when the dev never claimed it to be.
Well worth the 19$ to remove the ads
Sync has gone to subscription payments:
Profile -> Remove adsremoves ads permanently for 19$The Ultra subscription is for if you want to support the dev further.
It’s always justified to hate on proprietary software
Sync isn’t some international conglomerate harvesting your data, it’s one dude’s passion project. Guy’s gotta eat and monetizing FOSS is real hard.
Might be a hot take but it’s also justified to try and make money from software development that is not prefatory
It’s not illegal to make business with open source software
It’s not illegal, but it’s not profitable.
Companies aren’t making squat from happy fans donating a token amount to show support of the software. Everything adjacent to the open source software is profitable (enterprise sales, support contracts, hardware, corporate sponsors/funding, and so forth), but you’re going to have a really hard time selling something to consumers when they can just as easily get it for free.
infinity seems pretty awesome judging by the short time that I’ve spent with it
You’re still stuck in 2002 or something? Most of the web is literally FOSS. Gone are the myths of free software being worse when the whole world literally runs on it.
Counterpoint: most Javascript on the web is obfuscated to all hell. While technically you can see the code that’s running, it being obfuscated is definitely not in the spirit of FOSS, and largely the open source components of servers are being used to prop up all the closed-source stuff reaching end users.
It’s not about Javascript. All of the frameworks and front end tools are open source. React, nextjs, tailwind etc. - all are foss projects and run the best UX and UI we know of.
I don’t really want to be that guy, but at least in the case of React and NextJS, the companies have a business reason for them being open source.
Meta uses React internally in a lot of projects. Every other company or developer making contributions in their spare time is free labor, and it directly improves Meta’s own products.
Vercel has a vested interest in having developers adopt NextJS, as they sell web hosting. It’s easier to build a community of developers around an open-source product, and they even help out with contributions, documentation writing, and QA.
Tbh I’m not exactly sure how is that relevant? Be it Jesus guiding me to make TempleOS or incentive to sell some service the outcome is the same foss
My point is more that all these open source tools have been used by many, many, many sites to build a series of black boxes on top, for which there is no source available. I suppose one easy example is the existence of EME in open source browsers, the existence of which being the reason I actually don’t run a pre-compiled binary of Firefox, instead building it myself, with EME not built in.
Counter counterpoint: Often frontend js code is minified so that it is smaller and more efficient to transfer to the browser. For FOSS projects you should still be able to get access to that code, unminified, from the project git repo. In the same way desktop apps often ship as binary executables but you can still see the code that was compiled to build them if you find the source repo.
It does make things harder to debug for an average user but it makes it faster/more efficient to run for most end users (in the case of the desktop or phone app it makes it possible to run without needing compiler toolchains that mom and pop likely wouldn’t be able to grasp).
The key thing isn’t that what the end user’s computer runs is readable and editable but whether the code used to build that artifact is available easily and what restrictions there are on editing and redistributing that code.
On security concerns FOSS should be the better solution. Its code is readable and auditable by everyone. Closed Source need trust/faith in a company or in just one single person.
Most FOSS apps are equal to or better than proprietary software when it comes to functionality, but look like they were coded in the stone age.
Most casual users value GUI over everything. And while I personally can overlook shitty user interfaces on apps I use once in a blue moon, for a social media app I’m using daily, that’s a no go.
Yeah a lot of open source apps looks ugly but are just better. I have no idea why design is not a priority. Just look at the most popular products anywhere. They all look good.
UX people cannot make their own apps without hiring devs ( requiring money ).
Devs can create Open Source apps but they cannot afford to hire UX guys so the UX sucks.
Larger projects can attract both devs and UX guys but getting to popularity is hard and, even then, coordinating these diverse teams ( eg. dev and UX ) take project management skill and effort. That is yet another skill set that has to volunteer to be paid.
For a proprietary app, you simply hire the people you need. When you start, you need UX either to attract uses or money. So, UX is one of you first roles you spring for if you are proprietary ( depending on the market ).
(not op)
Sure, but in this case, most of the lemmy-clients (FOSS or not) are bad.
I have problems logging into my accounts (seems like some instances want my email as a username and many clients cannot handle this after I switched accounts), some clients don’t feature editing or deleting your posts, some clients don’t show my saved content, some clients don’t allow to see what you posted
Sure, much of this is because they started from scratch and will maybe surpass sync some day; but right now I couldn’t find something that isn’t worth. (didn’t try infinity yet, tho)
it’s not necessarily “FOSS is bad”; it’s just that the current lemmy-ecosystem is in it’s child shoes (I have the feeling this proverb doesn’t work in english?)
That said: I use Sync4Lemmy since 5 minutes and this is my first comment; so let’s see if/what it will deliver
it’s just that the current lemmy-ecosystem is in it’s child shoes (I have the feeling this proverb doesn’t work in english?)
The meaning is perfectly clear. I believe English speakers would say “…is in its infancy” but that’s just a common way of saying “early stages” not a proverb per se.
Convenience is objectively not superior to morals. Sync gets personal data, while Jerboa does not. Period. Jerboa has a little jank in not having fluid scrolling, but this is a matter of minor convenience. Get back to me when non-FOSS apps do not take any data.
Never heard that idiom before, (is it German?) Sentiment is clear though, I would probably just say “in its infancy” or something.
Also completely agree with your points. I’m a major supporter of FOSS but at the end of the day, I’m gonna use what actually works - the same as everyone else.
That idiom is intuitive as heck though, I like it
He’s not saying all FOSS software is bad, only the FOSS Lemmy clients are.
Personally, I found Jerboa to be okay. But Sync definitely feels more polished here, it’s not a question of FOSS and not-FOSS. I still have Jerboa installed though, just to see how it evolves, and I might switch back to it in the future.
At the end of the day, software developers need to eat. If they get to eat because their compensation model is driven by donations either before or after you use the app, who cares?
(Fair enough FOSS is free as in freedom, not just as in free beer, but I think that is moot to a lot of people, as long as the market space isn’t crushed by anti-competitive buisness practices)
The bigger issue at hand here is negotiating fair API uses for instances and their admins, who also need to eat, and make the apps possible too.
Why not go the way of Wikipedia and ask for donations? Hell even early Reddit gold awards were good.
Users are cheapskates pretty often
Have you seen how much more desperate Wikipedia gets every time they need to beg for donations?
They dont degrade the service until you pay. They dont lock features behind a paywall, they dont have ads. They beg you to pay, they dont extort you. Why does it matter that they seem desperate?
Would YOU want to feel that desperation if you were the creator wondering if you could make rent next month?
In Wikipedias case at least, the desperation is 100% marketing bluster and has been for at least a decade. Wikipedia is VERY well funded.
That’s marketing BS. Wikipedia is very well funded and in fact they consistently blow way past their fundraising goals
