I'm anti mega corporations with consolidated power and platform monopolies. I'm not anti small distributed devs getting paid for high quality hard work.
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.
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.
I think we need to separate the system from the product. With Reddit they're the same, with a single owner. With Lemmy/ActivityPub, just like with email, there's an underlying system that nobody owns. It's an ecosystem of pieces created by lots of different people.
It is a good thing that people are building products on top of that. Some of them are FOSS and some of them not. As long as no-one gets too much control of the underlying system then that's great! Users retain choice and can choose FOSS apps if they want, or they can choose something like Sync.
I agree it would be sad if the only apps were paid, but I think a mix is a sign of a healthy ecosystem.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
