Sync for Lemmy

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.

We will. Lemmy seems to easily get flooded with singular stories. Eg whenever Elon comes up with yet another dumbass decision.

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.

Be the change you want to see.

Niche communities start when the user ase grows quite a lot. Give it time.

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!

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

Some of us have been using Sync for 10+ years, we're not exactly looking for something new

Sync is already the most visually and ergonomically polished by far. That's not all that matters, but it's very important for me and many others.

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

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.

In terms of smoothness- 90hz screen only voyager and summit has that

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.

I definitely prefer FOSS, but hey if it gets you on the fedi, go for it.

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.

From what I've read that all hinges on kbin making an API available for use first

He's working on a onetime purchase to remove ads as stickied in the release thread. No idea where you got the $20 from. (Update: it's in the beta lol)

I'm actually already getting no ads by blocking with adguard's dns already. Just a thing to set in your phone's settings.

If you're already not seeing that many annoying ads in the first place, maybe just hold out on purchasing anything then lol.