Sync has been my mobile Reddit driver for over a decade and when Reddit dialed its enshitification to eleven and banned third party clients I immediately jumped over to Lemmy, but the available clients weren't quite up to snuff. Good for how new they were (e.g. Voyager) but Sync is a very mature app.
Having Sync for Lenny has been great so far, it feels like a lesser populated Reddit, for all intents and purposes, and I have zero need to go back to Reddit at this point.
I see this as a win for the Fediverse, and there are plenty of open source Lemmy clients out there for those who don't quite gel with the closed source nature of Sync.
To your last paragraph, I don't quite gel with the open source nature of so much of the ecosystem. The core framework being open source makes a lot of sense to me, but the instances being essentially volunteers makes me nervous about future burnout and lack of longevity.
I'm not saying one way is right or wrong, just that it's something I'm watching and forming opinions around, and current state given the number of times Sync can't do something because an API call fails, it makes me wonder if a small subscription to the instance wouldn't be the worst thing.
If an instance (Mastodon, Lemmy, whatever) was run by a business and came as part of a paywall subscription to say, The Economist, I think that might be pretty cool?
Long living instance, more intention being the local communities vs just duplicated meme subreddits, a stronger stance around moderation, etc and enough federating that everyone has choice and there's little centralization.
The BBC already put up a Fediverse instance (Mastodon), I expect that to happen more often. It's early days, but the fact that we're not at the whim of a couple of shitty Bay Area VC funded companies is so nice that I'll forgive the growing pains.
> but the instances being essentially volunteers makes me nervous about future burnout and lack of longevity.
Welcome to the early dial-up and internet world pre-corporatization.
I'm looking forward to Lemmy implementing account migration to add some insurance, but individual and community owned services was much of what built the internet. It's pretty resilient.
Meanwhile, something being owned by a corporation is far from any kind of guarantee. Shall we go through the Google graveyard?
You might not be wrong but I wouldn't mind seeing some actual data on the topic (admittedly have not looked). Google feels like a cheap example since their non-ads business model is to throw mud at the wall, and the graveyard is full of tech that did often make it into core apps. I've been on Gmail since forever, which stands as a Google-backed example of my previous comment sans some serious but statistically insignificant drama, which has prompted some to migrate and still have email.
Much of the early internet also isn't there anymore, and running a modern web application that hosts images, gifs, and videos at scale is obviously a different beast than static html where a marquee tag is as fancy as it gets.
I would claim the early web diminished primarily because the users left, not because the services died off and left users stranded (though I'll note that a lot of early services--IRC, Usenet, message boards, blogs, etc, are still around, though reduced in size and scope).
As for services dying, I picked Google because it was easy. But the graveyard is endless: Myspace, Friendster, and Geocities all spring to mind, just in the social space (and since you don't want to talk about Google, I won't mention Google+ or Orkut).
That's not to say the early internet was somehow perfect. My point is simply that a service being commercial offers no guarantee of longevity, and given the need to extract profit or die, with no way for a community to take over an unprofitable service and run it for their own benefit, I'd claim the opposite is true, especially as interest rates have risen and cheap funding has become more scarce, thereby placing a lot more pressure on those services to monetize or die.
> and running a modern web application that hosts images, gifs, and videos at scale is obviously a different beast than static html where a marquee tag is as fancy as it gets.
Except that's not what a Lemmy or Mastodon instance has to do. A small instance might only need to serve dozens or hundreds of users, and it only needs to host and serve the content they subscribe to.
I'll take that over one massive single point of failure.
I'm certainly not advocating for a single point of failure, but rather a monetized, competitive space that competes on user experience. More akin to music streaming than movie streaming.
I think Usenet and forum numbers probably pale in comparison to Reddit type platforms. Centralization is easier for mass appeal
> but rather a monetized, competitive space that competes on user experience. More akin to music streaming than movie streaming
I'll be honest, I don't know what this means, and comparing a service like Spotify to a social network like Lemmy doesn't make a ton of sense to me.
> Centralization is easier for mass appeal
Which is by definition a single point of failure.
As for mass appeal, I'd argue the issue isn't centralization, it's network effects. I.e. I'll use the service people I'm interested in use. If you have a lot of fragmented communities, that becomes a problem, and thus Reddit dominates. And it's the problem federation is specifically intended to solve, by stitching those individual communities into a larger network.
I mean to refer to centralization as a spectrum so I don't intend to say centralization means one option.
What I mean by comparing music streaming to movie streaming is that for all intents and purposes you can feel like your Spotify, YouTube, Amazon, Apple, whatever music libraries are pretty comprehensive, whereas that is absolutely not the case with Netflix, Max, etc.
I've tried moving to Lemmy, but as you've said it's less populated, significantly less from what I've seen. Almost to its detriment.
What makes Reddit great is the niche smaller communities and the historical data they have (despite the search being awful). Lemmy sadly doesn't have this, small and even some big communities aren't there - wallstreetbets for example. Even subs with 100k+ users have low hundreds of members on Lemmy.
I've jumped completely over to lemmy and am mulling writing a bot to replicate external content to my instance (from e.g., unmigrated subreddits);
the UX is fantastic though, tons of original content with almost zero spam. scaling the network seems hard as every event is a POST request (lol) but the community will persevere and overcome this imo
So good! Kinda just feels like I wouldn't even be able to tell the difference, save for my subreddits not being there. Love Sync, had always been my go-to app, and I'm glad it has a future.
The "Everything across the known Fediverse" option is pretty awesome. I was worried about the UX of searching and adding instances so this is an interesting take. I'll have to try it out
Also, the reason that people are excited about it is because they really liked Sync for Reddit, and have been anxiously awaiting the Lemmy version that was promised.
What would make you think(or even hope) this is true?
Until users are made to pay (ideally with dollars and not with attention) for a service like Reddit/Digg/Lemmy/whatever, these services are going to keep going away.
Eventually there are bills to be paid and/or people who want to be paid.
Still a step forward. Right now Reddit is like facebook messenger, doesn't interact with anything. If it goes away, it's 100% gone. If your phone carrier disappears, you might have to change your number but you could still text anyone in your phonebook.
At least when an instance is gone, their contents are still exist in the federated instances. The problem is those contents are now detached from the fediverse at large. Would be nice if there is a way to mark one of the federated instance as the new home for those contents to restart federation again.
> Until users are made to pay (ideally with dollars and not with attention) for a service like Reddit/Digg/Lemmy/whatever, these services are going to keep going away.
Nobody needs to be "made" to pay. There are many different models already for running Mastodon servers. Some are cooperatives, some are crowdfunded, some have premium content, some are literal non-profit charities, some are parts of bigger businesses that do anything. You can't have done any research into this before you made your comment or else you'd know that.
The fact that no one is really in control. I donate to my mastodon instance knowing that if it takes a turn for the worst, I can just go somewhere else and donate there. It’s not flawless but at least no one is holding all the cards.
I hope they fix the bad Cloudflare configuration -- every non-local username and community is incorrectly displayed as "[email protected]" for me since they didn't turn off Cloudflare's idiotic email address obfuscation setting.
Sync makes Lemmy feel a lot like Reddit, especially since it used to be my go-to app a year ago. Lemmy feels like it's been flooded with repost bots from Reddit making the content feel a lot less engaging.
Personally I'm okay not having the topic on Lemmy if there aren't any people posting about it.
I used Sync for the last couple years and having it for Lemmy is great. It feels like I'm browsing Reddit and has made the transition much easier. I wish I could leave Reddit entirely, but there are a couple of subs that don't yet have an equivalent on Lemmy.
Thunder [1] is also worth checking out. IMO its UI is even slicker than Sync's, plus it's open source and not ad-supported/freemium. If you ever used Relay for Reddit, you'll feel right at home.
There’s also ‘wefwef’ which is a SPA that’s highly based on the look and feel of Apollo for Reddit on iOS - https://wefwef.app/
I think they did a pretty good job with making it feel like an app, rather than a web page. If you add it to your Home Screen on iOS it’s imperceptible to an app and fixes safari lagging when you swipe back a page.
I'm going to have to give this one a huge thumbs down. Injecting ads into a free and open source webapp that previously did not have any just to get people to buy your ad free version is the kind of thing Lemmy is trying to get away from. This is quite unacceptable in my opinion. If the developer removes the ad-ridden version and only makes a single purchase paid version then it would be acceptable as you would be buying the software rather than paying them to escape the ads that they themselves added.
As it stands the developer of Sync is basically profiting off of the free content of others by injecting ads next to all of their posts and comments.
What are you on about? Sync is a native app that uses the Lemmy API, not some webapp wrapper. And the original version also features ads unless you bought the pro version.
I actually agree with you on this (having ads in a community full of supporters of open source and anti-capitalism is a bad idea), but I think the dev has already run the number and decides going with ad-supported model and $20 permanent ad-removal IAP is the only way to make enough profit to sustain full-time development given (currently) low number of lemmy users right now (100,000 active users is too small market to profitably sell $3 apps). I subscribed to sync ultra to support the dev, and hopefully if the dev is able to sustain himself from subscriptions, he might be more open to removing ads in the free version later.
Curious how you would prefer this be resolved? Or are you just saying you would have made different decisions and it's fine that Sync is doing what Sync is doing?
Simple. You get rid of the free with ads version and then sell the software for whatever amount of money. Or if there has to be a free version it wouldn't have ads. It would just not have the pro features which you would have to pay for.
I understand that is an option, but the way you say he's profiting off free content made it sound like it should be someone's choice other than the developers to dictate how he should or shouldn't monetize. But given your response now I'm thinking you mean you just wouldn't pick it.
The fact many people would, that Lemmy isn't affected one way or another, etc, makes it seem more like preference than morals or something. Just getting a lay of the land of the hate Sync is getting (on Lemmy, too).
It comes across as "we don't profit [like that/at all] so you shouldn't either". But as someone that doesn't see it as unethical, I just see user choice, and in this one case a paid plan subsidized by users that don't mind the ads.
Who said anything about not profiting? Of course people are free to choose to do bad things and there is nothing we can do to stop them. That doesn't mean they deserve praise or shouldn't be called out on it.
It is shameful in my personal opinion which is why I am expressing it.
Hm, okay. I appreciate the dialog, just trying to understand the perspective and I think I do (still disagree, but that's okay).
I thought maybe you'd go in the direction of laws or licenses being used to prohibit advertising in certain contexts, like downstream use of content, but what I'm hearing is that profiting off other's free content is fine, but in your opinion doing so with ads just isn't cool with you. That's reasonable, I just thought maybe your desired solution was more systemic.
Ultimately he's trying to cover his own salary. Would be interesting to know what that salary is, and what the price point would have to be to eliminate the ad revenue completely. As it stands, many balked at a one time cost of $20.
> As it stands, many balked at a one time cost of $20
For clarity, it's not a one time cost, it's a subscription cost, so $17 per year is what it shows inside my copy. I grant there is also a $99 "lifetime" option that is a one time payment, but my experience has been that "lifetime" means the lifetime of the business, not my lifetime
I don't meant to take any issue with the rest of the comments about needing to put food on their table, just that some folks in the syncforlemmy community itself even were complaining about the ongoing payment being harder to swallow that just paying for the app once like how most in-app purchases work for a situation like this
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 133 ms ] threadHaving Sync for Lenny has been great so far, it feels like a lesser populated Reddit, for all intents and purposes, and I have zero need to go back to Reddit at this point.
I see this as a win for the Fediverse, and there are plenty of open source Lemmy clients out there for those who don't quite gel with the closed source nature of Sync.
To your last paragraph, I don't quite gel with the open source nature of so much of the ecosystem. The core framework being open source makes a lot of sense to me, but the instances being essentially volunteers makes me nervous about future burnout and lack of longevity.
I'm not saying one way is right or wrong, just that it's something I'm watching and forming opinions around, and current state given the number of times Sync can't do something because an API call fails, it makes me wonder if a small subscription to the instance wouldn't be the worst thing.
If an instance (Mastodon, Lemmy, whatever) was run by a business and came as part of a paywall subscription to say, The Economist, I think that might be pretty cool?
Long living instance, more intention being the local communities vs just duplicated meme subreddits, a stronger stance around moderation, etc and enough federating that everyone has choice and there's little centralization.
Welcome to the early dial-up and internet world pre-corporatization.
I'm looking forward to Lemmy implementing account migration to add some insurance, but individual and community owned services was much of what built the internet. It's pretty resilient.
Meanwhile, something being owned by a corporation is far from any kind of guarantee. Shall we go through the Google graveyard?
Much of the early internet also isn't there anymore, and running a modern web application that hosts images, gifs, and videos at scale is obviously a different beast than static html where a marquee tag is as fancy as it gets.
As for services dying, I picked Google because it was easy. But the graveyard is endless: Myspace, Friendster, and Geocities all spring to mind, just in the social space (and since you don't want to talk about Google, I won't mention Google+ or Orkut).
That's not to say the early internet was somehow perfect. My point is simply that a service being commercial offers no guarantee of longevity, and given the need to extract profit or die, with no way for a community to take over an unprofitable service and run it for their own benefit, I'd claim the opposite is true, especially as interest rates have risen and cheap funding has become more scarce, thereby placing a lot more pressure on those services to monetize or die.
> and running a modern web application that hosts images, gifs, and videos at scale is obviously a different beast than static html where a marquee tag is as fancy as it gets.
Except that's not what a Lemmy or Mastodon instance has to do. A small instance might only need to serve dozens or hundreds of users, and it only needs to host and serve the content they subscribe to.
I'll take that over one massive single point of failure.
I think Usenet and forum numbers probably pale in comparison to Reddit type platforms. Centralization is easier for mass appeal
I'll be honest, I don't know what this means, and comparing a service like Spotify to a social network like Lemmy doesn't make a ton of sense to me.
> Centralization is easier for mass appeal
Which is by definition a single point of failure.
As for mass appeal, I'd argue the issue isn't centralization, it's network effects. I.e. I'll use the service people I'm interested in use. If you have a lot of fragmented communities, that becomes a problem, and thus Reddit dominates. And it's the problem federation is specifically intended to solve, by stitching those individual communities into a larger network.
What I mean by comparing music streaming to movie streaming is that for all intents and purposes you can feel like your Spotify, YouTube, Amazon, Apple, whatever music libraries are pretty comprehensive, whereas that is absolutely not the case with Netflix, Max, etc.
What makes Reddit great is the niche smaller communities and the historical data they have (despite the search being awful). Lemmy sadly doesn't have this, small and even some big communities aren't there - wallstreetbets for example. Even subs with 100k+ users have low hundreds of members on Lemmy.
the UX is fantastic though, tons of original content with almost zero spam. scaling the network seems hard as every event is a POST request (lol) but the community will persevere and overcome this imo
> Sync for Lemmy is a full-featured app for browsing Lemmy on the go. Featuring secure login, comments, messaging, profiles and more.
> Sync for Lemmy highlights: • Material You design • A beautiful rich Material design user interface with loads of customizable options
What would make you think(or even hope) this is true?
Until users are made to pay (ideally with dollars and not with attention) for a service like Reddit/Digg/Lemmy/whatever, these services are going to keep going away.
Eventually there are bills to be paid and/or people who want to be paid.
Technically true but the Gmail users are gonna be pissed.
Nobody needs to be "made" to pay. There are many different models already for running Mastodon servers. Some are cooperatives, some are crowdfunded, some have premium content, some are literal non-profit charities, some are parts of bigger businesses that do anything. You can't have done any research into this before you made your comment or else you'd know that.
https://github.com/mlemgroup/mlem
1: https://github.com/Memmy-App/memmy
2: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/memmy-for-lemmy/id6450204299
Personally I'm okay not having the topic on Lemmy if there aren't any people posting about it.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.syncapps.le...
[1] https://github.com/thunder-app/thunder
Edit: Oh! The developer is working on a tildes app: https://www.talklittle.com/rif-is-fun/whats-next Guess I'll just be waiting patiently, then.
I think they did a pretty good job with making it feel like an app, rather than a web page. If you add it to your Home Screen on iOS it’s imperceptible to an app and fixes safari lagging when you swipe back a page.
As it stands the developer of Sync is basically profiting off of the free content of others by injecting ads next to all of their posts and comments.
Ads are not a necessary business model.
The fact many people would, that Lemmy isn't affected one way or another, etc, makes it seem more like preference than morals or something. Just getting a lay of the land of the hate Sync is getting (on Lemmy, too).
It comes across as "we don't profit [like that/at all] so you shouldn't either". But as someone that doesn't see it as unethical, I just see user choice, and in this one case a paid plan subsidized by users that don't mind the ads.
It is shameful in my personal opinion which is why I am expressing it.
I thought maybe you'd go in the direction of laws or licenses being used to prohibit advertising in certain contexts, like downstream use of content, but what I'm hearing is that profiting off other's free content is fine, but in your opinion doing so with ads just isn't cool with you. That's reasonable, I just thought maybe your desired solution was more systemic.
Ultimately he's trying to cover his own salary. Would be interesting to know what that salary is, and what the price point would have to be to eliminate the ad revenue completely. As it stands, many balked at a one time cost of $20.
For clarity, it's not a one time cost, it's a subscription cost, so $17 per year is what it shows inside my copy. I grant there is also a $99 "lifetime" option that is a one time payment, but my experience has been that "lifetime" means the lifetime of the business, not my lifetime
I don't meant to take any issue with the rest of the comments about needing to put food on their table, just that some folks in the syncforlemmy community itself even were complaining about the ongoing payment being harder to swallow that just paying for the app once like how most in-app purchases work for a situation like this
The entire reason I'm on Lemmy is because of Sync.
One should also try https://github.com/dessalines/jerboa#readme from one of the Lemmy contributors
Have been using Boost for reddit for years, still using it with ReVanced patch.