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.
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.
I agree. SYNC will bring tons of reddit users to lemmy. I for one welcome that change.
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?
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.
My .02¢
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.
I will link my comment, which I had written for another person before. Sync for lemmy is currently in beta, so some things may be broken. But, most of it is still true. https://lemmy.ml/comment/834817
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.
RiF better? Lmaooo
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…
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.
FOSS isn’t about “corpo hate”. It’s about freedom. There’s a philosophy behind it. You can, of course, disagree with it, but I think you should know what you’re disagreeing with.
If the users don’t control the program, the program controls the users. With proprietary software, there is always some entity, the developer or “owner” of the program, that controls the program—and through it, exercises power over its users. A nonfree program is a yoke, an instrument of unjust power.
I’m talking about the community. A large part of the community absolutely is about gate-keeping and hating on corporations… and now devs too apparently.
A large part of the community absolutely is about gate-keeping and hating on corporations
I haven’t seen that at all. Hate doesn’t bring you far.
I have and it’s good and cool.
Well maybe not gatekeeping. But hating corporations…
In general I strongly prefer open source, because lots of propertiary software will try to vendor lock you and then extract money from you, when it’s hard to escape for you.
In this case however I can change back to Connect or other any second, so amount of control this program has is extremely minimal and experience in exchange is better.
Informed choice is better than picking and following dogma, because dogma doesn’t work in some cases.
Yeah F locked ecosystems. Anyone can walk away from Sync if they don’t like it.
The philosophy of FOSS is very cool but for one dev Sync is way too much work to be doing for free. It has my support.
It’s about a very narrowly and specifically defined version of freedom, which somewhat ironically restricts people’s ability to define freedom for themselves.
I personally find Apache2, MIT, or the WTFPL a lot more free-feeling than all the restrictions GPL imposes in the name of freedom.
Yes, the “free” in free software specifically refers to the freedom to read and modify the source code.
That’s the specific freedom we are talking about when we say “free as in freedom”.
Also, under the philosophy, permissive licenses (like MIT or BSD) is still considered free since you can see and modify the source code. The only thing the GPL strive to ensure is that this freedom will be awarded all others who interact with the fruits of your labour.
I used to agree until I saw corporations starting to fork open source projects to run them internally like the “I made this” meme.
If I spend months or years of my life toiling over a project and license it permissively with MIT or such, they can just swoop in one day and take it for free and be like “thanks, we’re going to make mega bucks off your code and give you nothing” (and yes this does happen https://www.elastic.co/blog/why-license-change-aws).
No, screw that! I’m gonna make my stuff AGPL and those guys can damn well pay me for my time of they want to use my stuff or more cynically, do it anyway or go and reimplement it themselves in-house knowing damn well I can’t afford an army of lawyers to actually do anything about it.
Your freedom to swing your arm ends at my nose. Your freedom to do whatever you want with my code ends when you want to bind other users with it.
Yeah, until he gets an attractive buyout offer from an SEO company who wants to get into data mining.
Hating on someone based on unfounded hypotheticals is fucked up. LJ has always been very open with the community for the whole time Sync was on reddit.
Username checks out ig?
Wow, that is “hating” in your world? I wish I lived there. Take it down a notch, dude.
Yes, I am talking about potentials; potentials that simply do not exist in the FOSS world but happen every day with commercial software. A significant difference between an independent dev and a libre project is that you own the libre project. No one can ever take it away from you. You merely borrow it from the independent dev, and in that way, and speaking as a frustrated developer myself, every single one of them suck in all the same ways that every single corporation sucks. There’s no difference. That’s not hate, that’s pragmatic realism.
So what exactly is the problem here? If Sync gets bought and you don’t like the new owner, you can stop using it and move on…
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I mean, just change apps at that point? There’s no lock-in, worst case you lose what you paid to remove ads. No point getting worked up over hypothetical scenarios
I mean he had all the opportunity for selling Sync for reddit and take profit. I converted to Sync nearly 7 years ago when I bought their ad free version called Sync Pro. He made great improvements adding material ui and lots of desirable features for an already great app. From my POV he didn’t abandon the app, gave updates till the last day of its existence and was a great dev in general who was active in his sub listening to our queries . Maybe the people who knew him from those days are the ones who is supporting him now.
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.
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.
Just commenting this for those that may think free software is referring to price.
Free software is diametrically opposed to proprietary software, and not paid software.
Free software is free in terms of libre, not necessarily gratis. And there are corporations and individual contributors to free software that do charge for their product and maintenance of it.
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…
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.
Sync is by far the most polished. Everyone acting this is some major company. It’s literally one dude.
The gatekeeping is so fucked up
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?
Still love sync tho
Yeah this comic is hilarious but sync is just so slick. Thunder has promise though.
Really enjoying Thunder, hoping it keeps gaining features.
Deleted the half dozen other apps I had for all my Lemmy accts. Now I have just 1 app to rule them all.
Yep. All other apps got deleted. I get the whole foss thing but sync is god tier ill pay for every day.
They’ve released the lifetime price if you’re interested for $170
$170?! 😱
In my country it’s like USD $20 to get rid of the ads forever
That’s the wrong IAP.
One time ad removal is $20 or less
Yep. And if this app turns bad after a while for whatever reason, we can always go back to the FOSS alternatives.
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.
That’s the price for ultra lifetime. Ad remover one time purchase is $20
I didn’t see that option at first. It’s actually quite reasonable, I think I will use that.
I only saw monthly and yearly pricing?
Wow the sync Dev has probably made more money than every single Lemmy server admin combined lmfao.
I honestly don’t see what the problem is. If you prefer FOSS use FOSS apps.
I’ve tried every single Lemmy app for iOS and Android, but I can honestly say nothing comes close to how smooth and native Sync feels.
I wasn’t even a Sync user on Reddit so I didn’t understand the hype, but I get it now. On my Pixel 6 Pro all of the other Lemmy apps had some kind of issues, whether that be random crashes or frame rate issues. But Sync is just so smooth and feature rich.
I’ve also joined the sync discord and the developer is very clear on what type of data he collects (He doesn’t, but Google may).
Also with the pricing, if you don’t agree with the price that’s your opinion, but the amount of complaining is ridiculous. He made the app so whatever he wants to charge is his decision. You can also still freely use the app (with ads) so no one is forcing you to buy.
I like all the FOSS and community development of different Lemmy clients that’s going on, it’s really awesome and great to see.
But if Apollo was released for Lemmy, I’d subscribe to Ultra (or buy lifetime) in a heartbeat and only look at alternatives out of interest, not because I’d want to use them as my main Lemmy client. Apollo was just that good.
Views like this one feel pretty toxic and elitist to me. Let people use Sync if they like it. Let people use their Android phone unrooted if they are fine with it. Heck, let people use Windows if they like it.
To be fair, this should be the other way around. All these foss apps are the teletubbies because they’re clunky and have major bugs. Sync is the power ranger.
Yeah I’ve used all the apps in this post and Sync is just light years ahead of all of them right now. Well worth the 19$ to remove the ads
Kinda shitty to hate on Sync like this for not being foss when the dev never claimed it to be.
Well worth the 19$ to remove the ads
Sync has gone to subscription payments:
Profile -> Remove adsremoves ads permanently for 19$The Ultra subscription is for if you want to support the dev further.
Thanks. I hadn’t noticed that.
It’s always justified to hate on proprietary software
Might be a hot take but it’s also justified to try and make money from software development that is not prefatory
It’s not illegal to make business with open source software
It’s not illegal, but it’s not profitable.
Companies aren’t making squat from happy fans donating a token amount to show support of the software. Everything adjacent to the open source software is profitable (enterprise sales, support contracts, hardware, corporate sponsors/funding, and so forth), but you’re going to have a really hard time selling something to consumers when they can just as easily get it for free.
Sync isn’t some international conglomerate harvesting your data, it’s one dude’s passion project. Guy’s gotta eat and monetizing FOSS is real hard.
No but it contains spyware from one of those
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.
(not op)
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
Never heard that idiom before, (is it German?) Sentiment is clear though, I would probably just say “in its infancy” or something.
Also completely agree with your points. I’m a major supporter of FOSS but at the end of the day, I’m gonna use what actually works - the same as everyone else.
That idiom is intuitive as heck though, I like it
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?)
The meaning is perfectly clear. I believe English speakers would say “…is in its infancy” but that’s just a common way of saying “early stages” not a proverb per se.
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Most FOSS apps are equal to or better than proprietary software when it comes to functionality, but look like they were coded in the stone age.
Most casual users value GUI over everything. And while I personally can overlook shitty user interfaces on apps I use once in a blue moon, for a social media app I’m using daily, that’s a no go.
On security concerns FOSS should be the better solution. Its code is readable and auditable by everyone. Closed Source need trust/faith in a company or in just one single person.
infinity seems pretty awesome judging by the short time that I’ve spent with it
Connect is not broken that I’ve noticed after the first week or so.
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.
I couldn’t care less if foss app users or developers are butthurt because closed apps are suddenly available and gaining popularity.
Sync for lemmy landed and it has been more stable and has more features than any of the other lemmy apps I’ve tried.
Maybe if the foss apps were stable and feature rich more casual plebs like me would use them, but at the moment they all feel kind of broken.
Also, I would take issue with jerboa here. Jerboa is there but not Connect? Lol…
