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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

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.

d0gbread 3y ago
My experience also. 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.
- danielbln 3y ago
  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.
- BaseballPhysics 3y ago
  > 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?
  - d0gbread 3y ago
    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.
    - BaseballPhysics 3y ago
      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.
      - d0gbread 3y ago
        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
- rglullis 3y ago
  I guess you will be interested in taking a look at https://communick.news/post/23471 https://communick.news/post/23471
7ewis 3y ago
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.
- squiffsquiff 3y ago
  You realise that the subscriber count is typically showing only the subscribers from your own instance?
- kramerger 3y ago
  Well, speaking from experience... most people are waiting for a client that doesn't suck before moving away from reddit.
  - corrigible 3y ago
    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
    - rglullis 3y ago
      Did you look into https://lemmit.online https://lemmit.online?
      - corrigible 3y ago
        oh wow, thanks for this!
      - mdaniel 3y ago
        I would encourage you to post that as a separate submission, since I have so many questions (https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=lemmit.online https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=lemmit.online shows nothing)

d0gbread 3y ago

My experience also. 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.

danielbln 3y ago
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.
BaseballPhysics 3y ago
> 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?
- d0gbread 3y ago
  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.
  - BaseballPhysics 3y ago
    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.
    - d0gbread 3y ago
      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
rglullis 3y ago
I guess you will be interested in taking a look at https://communick.news/post/23471 https://communick.news/post/23471

7ewis 3y ago

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.

squiffsquiff 3y ago
You realise that the subscriber count is typically showing only the subscribers from your own instance?
kramerger 3y ago
Well, speaking from experience... most people are waiting for a client that doesn't suck before moving away from reddit.
- corrigible 3y ago
  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
  - rglullis 3y ago
    Did you look into https://lemmit.online https://lemmit.online?
    - corrigible 3y ago
      oh wow, thanks for this!
    - mdaniel 3y ago
      I would encourage you to post that as a separate submission, since I have so many questions (https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=lemmit.online https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=lemmit.online shows nothing)