Sync for Lemmy
play.google.com
play.google.com
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.
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
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://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.syncapps.le...
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.
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.
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
> 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
Personally I'm okay not having the topic on Lemmy if there aren't any people posting about it.
Have been using Boost for reddit for years, still using it with ReVanced patch.
1: https://github.com/Memmy-App/memmy
2: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/memmy-for-lemmy/id6450204299
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