• h14h@midwest.social
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    1 year ago

    This kind of gatekeeping and elitism is bad for Lemmy and for FOSS.

    It makes this community a less welcoming place and leaves new folks with a bad first impression. Much better to be welcoming and let people learn/see the benefits of FOSS at their own pace.

    • dzonc@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I’d given up on lemmy because every so I had tried was unfinished and unpolished. I tried sync and finally felt like the user experience wasn’t getting in the way of content.

      I’d love to support foss, if a genuinely comparable experience existed.

      I’m glad to say that sync has revived my interest in lemmy.

      • machinaeZER0@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        You should check out Thunder, even if you gave it a try at some point - it’s super polished and it’s gotten even better week after week. In my opinion it has the best compact mode of all the lemmy clients, as long as you don’t mind swipe actions!

        • thimantha@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I was using Thunder last week until Sync’s open beta got approved and the User Experience and the interface of Thunder is nowhere near Sync. It’s a night and day difference, and a difference that would have made me use Lemmy less and less.

          • machinaeZER0@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            Thunder is like a month old - it’s still growing and will continue to improve with the community’s help :) if you think anything could be improved, definitely shout it out on the GitHub page!

            • thimantha@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              I understand that it’s new, and it is definitely the best FOSS Lemmy app out of the dozens that I used. But it has a very long way to go to achieve the same level of User Experience that Sync has. It’s not even close and I don’t think anything bar a major UI/UX rehaul could fix that.

        • xenspidey@lemmy.zip
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          1 year ago

          Not OP, but I’ve tried thunder. It’s OK. Sync is light years above all other clients I’ve tried. (same with reddit as well) swipe actions? Sync is the king of swipe actions.

          • machinaeZER0@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            I mostly meant if OP was interested in FOSS :) Sync has been fine too in my short time with it today, but personally I’m still quite taken with Thunder. Excited that all the Sync fans are excited!

      • Zalack@startrek.website
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        1 year ago

        IMO FOSS has really great offerings when it comes to libraries or other highly technical code.

        But something about either the community or incentive structure results in sub-par UI/UX. Obviously not a rule, but definitely a trend I’ve noticed.

        • Meloku@lemmy.zip
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          1 year ago

          Don’t forget the community’s reaction to comments like yours, why down vote him if he’s stating the obvious? FOSS projects often focus so much on technical features because everyone wants to flex their code-fu, but nobody gives enough time to UI/UX. Just look at pretty much every Lemmy web frontend, fugly webpages with early 2000s look-and-feel, usually slow and/or buggy, and with little to no user feedback.

        • Khotetsu@lib.lgbt
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          1 year ago

          I’ve seen it for years and years now, and I can only conclude that it’s down to the kinds of people who are attracted by these kinds of projects.

          They’re tech literate at a professional level by necessity in order to engage with these things at an early time in their development, and this seems to drive a mentality that makes UX design kind of an afterthought, since they already know how to do the things they want the software to do, and they’re not focused on how less tech literate users will handle it.

          Then you add in the small minority of gatekeepers that wind up in every community, who feel that a larger, more generalized userbase would be invading their niche community, and you end up with stuff like the Linux forums where asking a simple question would get you a series of remarks that essentially boil down to “go fuck yourself, you should know how to do it already.”

          I feel like the people concerned with UI/UX come into these kinds of projects later on after they’ve matured a little, rather than right from start, and this causes resistance to their changes because the userbase is already entrenched in the current UX, especially from the gatekeeper folk in the community who see a higher tech literacy threshold as a good thing.

          • Zalack@startrek.website
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            1 year ago

            That’s very subjective. I have yet to find a Linux desktop I like as much as MacOS, especially when it comes to WACOM drivers. The stylus response time/curve almost always feels wrong.

            Also, I’ve worked with designers who can get something that looks and feels fully professional on a first pass, so it’s not just newness for Lemmy.

      • penfore@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        It’s been one year of this conversation, but I just found it now.

        Sync has also made me use Lemmy more often, but I was still missing a good web environment until recently when I started using photon. It is the best web experience I had using Lemmy and now I’m using as a progressive web app.

        Photon repository here! Give it a star or start contributing to it.

    • DigitalPortkey@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      This is why I unsubscribed from the Android community. I love Android, I use nothing but Linux at home and really appreciate open source software.

      But the FOSS…enthusiasm is starting to border on zealotry. It’s getting really unpleasant.

          • DigitalPortkey@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            This drives me nuts. I like Chrome. It’s simple, it’s fast, the extensions I want run on it (for now), and I love the Google Account Sync because I have an Android phone. This greatly pisses off people for whatever reason, despite the fact I’ve never had a bad opinion about Firefox and love what they’re doing too, and I never criticize anyone for choosing Firefox.

            As with everything open source communities need nuance and understanding, otherwise they start to feel like cults.

            • Misconduct@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              For whatever reason? They’re trying to DRM the internet lol. You’re certainly entitled to your opinion but there are some pretty big reasons to be mad at Google on a good day. Nobody should take that out on you but I understand the frustration. People letting things slide because it doesn’t bother them specifically until it’s too late is how everything keeps getting worse.

        • rbits@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          I use Linux as my daily driver, yet I 100% believe Linux is overrated. It’s great if you’re willing to put in the work to get it working well, or maybe if you have someone else to do all your tech support for you, but it’s just not a good option for the majority of people.

          I hate when people keep trying to push it on Windows users, especially when they go on about how “easy” it is. It’s not. And doing that will get people to try it out with high expectations and then get disappointed when they try it out and that’s not the case.

          • Rodeo@lemmy.ca
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            1 year ago

            I honestly feel like people who say this stuff either haven’t tried Linux since 2008 or went straight to Arch.

            I use Manjaro as my daily driver and I never need to fix the system. It really does just work, and these a bunch of disyros out there that do.

            The only thing you might find terrible is trying to run windows programs on Linux, to which I say: dual boot! Even with all the progress Proton, Lutris etc. have made, it’s still way easier to just boot into windows on the occasion you want to play games or whatever.

        • Resistentialism@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I had to leave the Linux memes community because I swear nearly every post was shitting on Windows. Yes, I get it. Windows isn’t all that great. But, much like Ios, it just works for what I need. And I haven’t had any issues that weren’t ny fault with it.

          If the game I play most, and the number one reason why i go on my pc, works on Windows, but won’t work on Linux. Which OS is better for me?

          I thought all this software war crap era was over. That was shit I cared about when I was 14 or something. Just let it herself use what they want and explain the benefits of alternatives, only if they care.

    • Poggervania@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      100% agree. Going “haha, aren’t I COOL for NOT using this one popular app or software!?” contributes absolutely nothing and actively makes the community uninviting. I’m all for FOSS, but if a closed-source app is better than the FOSS options, I ain’t gonna knock on anybody for using it.

      Also why even use an app outside of accessibility reasons? Been using Kbin on a mobile browser and it’s been a pretty good experience.

    • snor10@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      I don’t understand how promoting FOSS in favor of proprietary software is bad for FOSS?

      • Meloku@lemmy.zip
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        1 year ago

        This is not promoting FOSS. This is mocking closed-source/paid Lemmy clients.

    • StaySquared@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Dood the automod is wild… people getting banned for, “suspicious activity”… and then there’s no way to ask the mods why the ban.

  • jerieljan@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    I don’t get the point of this.

    Since when did Sync masquerade itself as FOSS?

    Just use whatever you want. Isn’t that why we’re all here?

    Is the Sync noise getting to you? Just ignore it. It’s natural since the app just opened up and there were a significant amount of Reddit refugees that badly wanted their app back.

    • Altima NEO@lemmy.zip
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      1 year ago

      I think it’s more the Lemmy userbase having different expectations than that of the Reddit userbase, with Lemmy being such a shift from Reddit.

    • drbi@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I agree. SYNC will bring tons of reddit users to lemmy. I for one welcome that change.

    • jonesy@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      I could use this same logic to talk about your comment. People are free to dunk on other apps, so why not just mute the post?

    • Aa!@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Seems to me this has spawned a fair bit of discussion… Which is the actual reason we’re all here.

      Sync has gotten a lot of buzz (I don’t understand why, even on Reddit, rif was always better anyway) and that’s always going to bring out the people who don’t agree, for one reason or another.

      Don’t mistake an opinion you don’t share for anything beyond what it is. I could just as easily parrot your statement back: if you don’t think this discussion is productive, just ignore it. There’s plenty of other discussions to get involved with on Lemmy

      • Takumidesh@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Sync gained a big following because it had a core feature many many moons ago, when having constant cell service was much less common, it allowed you download and save hundreds of posts and all the comments while you were on wifi, so you could browse reddit offline, it did this automatically and in the background (based on your settings ) hence the name ‘Sync’. This was a killer feature back in the day, at least for me. As that became less of a need, the app continued to change and add a lot of nice features, like lots of customizations, random NSFW, a very good OLED dark mode, etc, so there was no point in switching to something else.

        My .02¢

      • TheOneAndOnly@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        RiF was all I ever used. Never even heard of Sync until I migrated to Lemmy at the end of June. Fwiw, I found Connect rather quickly, and it feels almost exactly like RiF. Enough that it scratches the itch. I tried Sync for about an hour today… It’s fine enough… But I can’t figure out what it has that Connect doesn’t. Maybe it’s just that everyone who used Sync was just comfortable and didn’t want to change. I’m fine with it being a paid app, or subscription, or whatever dude decides to do to help support himself, too…I just don’t get the hubbub when there’s a perfectly excellent free alternative in Connect.

        • Aa!@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Yeah, Sync was fine, just nothing special for me. I’m pretty sure it’s mostly just people who want the same experience they had on Reddit.

          I adapted to Voyager pretty quickly, and the only real issue I’ve had with it was that it didn’t handle it well when .world went down, but that’s improved enough now. I’m not the biggest fan of the swipe gestures, as they’ve made me accidentally vote on a lot of things without noticing, but it’s nothing I can’t get used to.

          I don’t need it to be exactly like it was before. I’m satisfied with something simple that does the job.

        • TheOneAndOnly@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Did you use them both? I did not. I can say I loved RiF, but I’d never even heard of Sync until about a month ago. Be interested to hear the opinion of one who’d used both…

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            1 year ago

            I have. A lot of it boils down to personal preference in how you prefer your app to behave and look like. Customization can only get you so far. UI aside, they were both pretty feature complete.

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    Sync is just so much more polished and feature-rich than all of these already… It’s exactly like how it was when it was for reddit, and it’s just one dev! I don’t mind at all paying for a fantastic app.

    You guys are taking the justified corpo hate and extending it to talented individual devs just making a living.

  • SaddieTheMad@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I am disliking this sentiment. I am on the Fediverse because Sync’s developer and many others were betrayed by Reddit and I wanted to show solidarity and to ‘punish’ Reddit by leaving. The Fediverse’s values are admirable, but I do not share them all. I believe in supporting good projects, even some that are private if they don’t pose a risk of destroying something bigger, and Sync is a good project that can be easily abandoned without consequences if something goes wrong.

  • KᑌᔕᕼIᗩ@lemmy.ml
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    Paid software absolutely has a place in the world. Evil companies producing evil software designed to build a monopoly and lock out FOSS apps do not. I don’t think Sync falls into the latter and I’m happy they’ve made the choice to be able to eat.

  • Eddie@lemmy.lucitt.social
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    Tbh, I think this whole thing is being blown out of proportion. Part of FOSS and the internet in general is the ability to have choice over what you use and spend your time with. Just because Sync is out, doesn’t mean you can’t continue to use your FOSS apps. It just means that we now have an option for people who want to pay for a very polished experience.

    • lhamil64@beehaw.org
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      I agree. Considering the backlash at reddit for nixing third party apps, you’d think people would praise all the options for Lemmy.

      • Juno@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        The reason I’m on lemmy is I WANT to use weird apps and see different things programmers do. It’s like the post is telling me just get taco bell when there’s a dude selling Mexican grandma style enchiladas out of a food truck and I can go over that corner restaurant and get some fire chimmi-chanagas.

        I like weird stuff. So what about it? God damned people pushing some vanilla boring shit.

        • Eddie@lemmy.lucitt.social
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          1 year ago

          Just ignore them? I don’t see your point here at all. If you don’t want to eat Taco bell, don’t eat it???

          • Juno@beehaw.org
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            1 year ago

            Right, I’m on a third lemmy app, just saying my 2cents. What’s the problem exactly ?

      • Whirlybird@aussie.zone
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        1 year ago

        What I find hilarious is that the Sync dev could have simply made a $5/month subscription for the Reddit app and continued on making a fortune from Reddit’s product, but instead told people to come here where there are no API costs…and then starts charging a subscription fee and massive one off payment lol. Oh and the app also has ads if you don’t pay, despite Lemmy itself not having ads lol

        • OtakuAltair@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Just making a living from his great app. Completely fair.

          You can get rid of ads with a one-time payment of 19.99$. Not a ‘massive one off payment’ at all. I have the subscription though cuz I want to support this fastastic app and dev.

  • spirinolas@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    If apps were girls:

    I was always in love with Sync. But life happened and we had to go different ways for non-romantic reasons. Some fucker called Spez, long story…

    Eventually I met Voyager and she was great. Any user would be lucky to have her. But Sync was always the one that got away. Everyday I looked at Voyager and thought she was awesome but I was always holding a candle for Sync. But Sync was gone and I had to move on. But I could never really move on.

    But life happened again and Sync was coming back. I had committed to Voyager but, as great as she was, I always thought how she came short of Sync. Sync came back and she was as stunning as I remembered. I couldn’t stay with Voyager. I’m sorry Voyager. You’re an awesome girl but I was pretty much just using you since I couldn’t have Sync.

    I’m a user Voyager, I make no excuses. There, there…

  • EnderMB@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I say this as someone that uses FOSS day to day for work, I don’t really give a shit if my Lemmy app is FOSS.

    For me, Sync was Reddit. It’s where 99% of my interaction with Reddit happened. I don’t really give a shit about Lemmy or the fediverse either. I’m here because Sync is a seamless product that gave me the best interface.

    Despite saying that I don’t care about Lemmy or other distributed servers, Sync is basically that sync (lol) for me. Once I map my old subreddits on Lemmy, the experience doesn’t change.

  • FireworkFuse@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Oh nooooooo someone made a familiar and easy to use app to help people get used to this new ecosystem that can only thrive if people actually show up and use it. What a real shame.

    Are we really being this petty already?

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    1 year ago

    Sync is by far the most polished. Everyone acting this is some major company. It’s literally one dude.

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    I honestly don’t see what the problem is. If you prefer FOSS use FOSS apps.

    I’ve tried every single Lemmy app for iOS and Android, but I can honestly say nothing comes close to how smooth and native Sync feels.

    I wasn’t even a Sync user on Reddit so I didn’t understand the hype, but I get it now. On my Pixel 6 Pro all of the other Lemmy apps had some kind of issues, whether that be random crashes or frame rate issues. But Sync is just so smooth and feature rich.

    I’ve also joined the sync discord and the developer is very clear on what type of data he collects (He doesn’t, but Google may).

    Also with the pricing, if you don’t agree with the price that’s your opinion, but the amount of complaining is ridiculous. He made the app so whatever he wants to charge is his decision. You can also still freely use the app (with ads) so no one is forcing you to buy.

    • Dr. Zoidberg@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Deleted the half dozen other apps I had for all my Lemmy accts. Now I have just 1 app to rule them all.

    • iegod@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Yeah this comic is hilarious but sync is just so slick. Thunder has promise though.

    • Rusty@lemmy.ca
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      I love sync too, but the price is crazy. In 2014 I bought reddit sync for like $5, and now lemmy sync lifetime price is $135. I’ll stick with Connect.

  • Reamen@lemmy.ml
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    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.