this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2024
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Sync for Lemmy

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I've been using Sync for at least three years, and I've been a vocal advocate of the app, but I don't feel right paying for ad free anymore.

I am unable to transfer my paid account to my new phone and yet Google continues to take out my $2.13 every month. I understand everyone needs time away sometimes but I don't see how LJD feels right accepting people's money while providing ZERO support for months on end, and never bothering to at least appoint a maintainer in his absence.

I see issues piling up with this app and I'm forced to look at ads while LJD does whatever he wants and takes my money. I feel stupid that I've been paying this man for years to provide a good experience just to be taken for a ride like this.

I had bought the lifetime pro back in the Reddit days, I paid for pro subscription while using Lemmy, and at this point I'm just done. I hate writing this post because I've been a happy, continual premium user of this app for literally years, but there's only so much I can handle.

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[โ€“] Grimy 52 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I'm not sure what extra features sync offers but most apps don't have ads? I'm using Jerboa personally. It was a bit unstable a year ago but it's fine now. Images don't load sometimes, but I'm not sure if that is the apps fault.

[โ€“] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Before LJD had Sync moved to Lemmy post-API I was using Jerboa and back then it was super buggy and slow because it was a freshly minted app. It's nice to see how well the FOSS alternatives have been catching up.

[โ€“] [email protected] 15 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Jerboa is solid, but it's not feature-rich. Not great for media browsing. It's still my main client since I use Lemmy mostly for text, not images or videos.

Eternity and Voyager are worth looking at, too.

[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

I appreciate the word up, I'm on Voyager now and I'm happy with it. I've been playing with other clients for other services I've been using. Lately I'm getting into Gemblogs and finding nice ways to view and eventually contribute to it myself, so I'll probably stick to that for my "stripped down text experience", and keep Lemmy for more visual stuff. Pixelfed has been a great experience to get into, too! The open internet is so much fun to explore. It's a wonderful time to be a netizen.

[โ€“] coriza 4 points 1 month ago

When I moved to lemmy (Don't know if was last year or this year already) all the other apps I tested was really bad at discoverability. On Sync you can open and instance and see the list of communities in there for example.

[โ€“] [email protected] 32 points 1 month ago (2 children)

There's so many good options now: Eternity, Raccoon, Voyager, Jerboa, I'd give the competition a look and donate to the one you settle on.

[โ€“] [email protected] 16 points 1 month ago

Checking in from Voyager. The waters great over here - come join us!

[โ€“] calamitycastle 12 points 1 month ago

What I find quite interesting is that sync is obviously very feature rich, it's why it was many people's preferred client.

I just downloaded a few of the others and here's a few things:

  • you can set different sort methods based on view. This feels important at the moment when communities are smaller. I have my subs set to New but Instance and All to something else
  • feed view customisations are super deep. Nice to have obviously but this is where all the inherited value from the old reddit app is
  • gesture navigation still feels better than all others but I might be biased because I'm used to it

However, it's undeniable that there are still some basic things it doesn't handle perfectly. At the moment the perks outweigh the missing bits for me, BUT I found the pricing at launch to be optimistic at best, so like another commenter, I'm using the free version and blocking ads via Blokada and I'm happy enough

It would be great if it did everything perfectly I agree but that's true for all the apps rn

[โ€“] Nutteman 15 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Obligatory LJD tends to disappear intermittently before coming back with a major update. I'm not saying that you should be happy with it, but as a longtime sync user I've come to accept it because homie always comes back with a banger update, historically.

[โ€“] [email protected] 21 points 1 month ago

I appreciate that and I've been using Sync since 2019, it isn't like I'm brand new to the app or his proclivities. I don't think this is a good excuse for completely abandoning maintenance and user issues for months on end with zero accountability for it, just because every so often he does a big update.

[โ€“] [email protected] 16 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

I was fine with that until I realized Lemmy is relatively young software and breaking changes will come up.

Edit: I cannot view comments on anything posted to local communities

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

I was having this issue, the solution was to go into my profile settings on the instance it's made on, and select literally every single language. So far, it's fixed it.

[โ€“] KazuyaDarklight 6 points 3 weeks ago

We are getting dangerously close to a full year of absence this time.

[โ€“] [email protected] 14 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I also canceled my subscription because it's been months and half of the posts with comments still show no comments forcing me to open every post in Firefox just to read the comments. Seems like too many bugs that leave the app unusable are being ignored.

[โ€“] EisFrei 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I fixed this problem by enabling all languages in the Lemmy instances website settings.

Otherwise the comments posted in other languages will get filtered.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

The thing is the missing comments are all in English, and they affect entire posts and not just certain commenters so it probably isn't related to the language setting for individual comments, otherwise only certain comments would be missing and not the whole thread. Plus I already have all languages enabled. As a test I also found one commenter from an empty thread and viewed other posts they commented on and both their comment and everyone else's showed up. If it was related to people marking their comments wrong I would expect it to affect their comments on other threads too.

I'm curious if the problematic posts are the same for others, for example this thread with 60+ comments is one that shows empty in sync but with the correct comment count: https://lemmy.ml/post/22091314

And this post too with ~20 comments, also all in English: https://lemmy.ml/post/22089346

I double checked and my account settings on the web UI have all languages selected, and sync even shows the correct count for comments, just doesn't display any of them.

[โ€“] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago

Agreed. I would've paid if the price wasn't so steep and felt a bit guilty, despite having paid for the Reddit version a few times

Really glad I didn't now because the dev has disappeared, but I hope he's ok!

[โ€“] Magister 11 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I bought Sync 14 years ago for Reddit, it was a one shot payment. Same for Sync Lemmy, I bought it once for like 20$ and that's it.

[โ€“] coriza 2 points 1 month ago

Me too but I believe Sync for some time now has a Pro+ that has more features and is subscription based.

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

If you just need add-free feature why do you need to pay for monthly subscription? I thought for ad-free feature, we only need to pay for one-off payment.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Do you have a bug report for not being able to restore your purchases? I just tried it a few weeks ago with my new phone and it did work without any problems.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

No I do not. I didn't think to make a bug report only because I have seen multiple threads on here of people demonstrating errors and seemingly not being able to get help with the Dev being absent.

[โ€“] hate2bme -5 points 1 month ago (2 children)

You can use revanced to block the ads.

[โ€“] [email protected] 15 points 1 month ago

Sure I can, or I can use any other app that makes use of free API to provide an ad-free experience. I'm on Voyager now. I use Revanced but it's ridiculous that I would need to do a reacharound like that just to use my app the way I paid to use it.

[โ€“] Dumnorix 3 points 1 month ago

Or set your dns to dns.adguard.com