Don’t let anyone pressure you into trying (or not trying) different apps if you have one you like. Sync happens to be the one that resonated with me the most, but other people won’t feel the same.
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You can support FOSS devs, too.
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Don’t worry voyager I’ll never leave you and captain Janeway
Yeah, because why should app developers get paid, right? They should all code for free at their local public library. Maybe live in a big ceramic jar like Diogenes.
“Free” as in “freedom”, not price. There’s nothing stopping somebody from making money on FOSS.
Goddam Richard Stallman really screwed the PR up on that one with the “free” thing.
The F in FOSS stands for free, IIRC. The ability to access, use, share the code, etc. has more to do with the open source part of the acronym. I haven’t really seen anyone complain about Sync being closed sourced so far… Just that you have to pay not to see ads.
Ive only ever seen FOSS developers get support through donations. Which is nice and all, but likely not enough for an independent developer like ljdawson to survive on alone.
Dont get me wrong, I like FOSS apps too, but the experience almost always suffers to some degree; its easy to see why. I just don’t get why Sync is being singled out like some kind of evil tech monopoly lately. As far as I can tell, its just an individual developer who released a great app for free (yes with ads, you’re the product, blah blah blah) with an optional lifetime payment to disable ads completely.
I installed both Sync and Infinity on the same day and I’ve mostly used Infinity since, I just don’t get the fuss about Sync, I think it’s only nostalgia from its Reddit users tbh (I used Boost for Reddit fwiw).
I’ve been happy with Liftoff.
Wefwef/voyager all the way Ü
Shut up, don’t use it if you don’t want to.
Lmao wow so defensive. Haven’t seen this type of behaviour since I left reddit
Seeing the Sync for lemmy pricing, I just sent 20 USD to the Lemmy/Jerboa devs for offering all this for free!
I did the opposite. The moment I saw Sync for Lemmy available to download I installed it and immediately purchased Ultra because bless LJ for making the superior app. He deserves getting paid for his work. And it’s not like he requires you to pay for the app. It’s free for everyone, you just get some additional features if you are willing to pay and by doing that you also support the developer. So I decided to support him. I’ve been using Sync for Reddit before and I knew I needed this app for Lemmy. Now I feel home.
What’s important is Lemmy getting adopted doesn’t matter what app people choose.
We have great apps with PWA as Voyager or old Reddit theme with MLMYM.
Never want to use a censored social agregator as Reddit.
Just an FYI for those who aren’t aware, a native Voyager app is available via TestFlight, and it’s very similar to Apollo.
This discourse in these comments is stupid. People can complain about Sync if they have something to complain about. It’s a fucking forum. Personally I hate the idea of restricting features and using ads to get people to pay, especially when I have several FOSS apps that work perfectly for me, I don’t think Sync feels any more “slick”.
There, that’s my opinion. I don’t like Sync and I’m not attacking anyone for using it.
Which open source app do you feel is just as slick as sync? Genuine question. I’d be happy to support a FOSS app, but all that I found had weird issues and quirks, and/or janky UI. Liftoff was the best I’d found but again, buggy and janky.
They aren’t using ads to “get people to pay” they’re using ads to pay for people who don’t want to pay
Yes, the ads make a little money. But it’s still a problem you create then sell the solution to. It’s at least half the reason to do ads.
Not really. The alternative is charging for the app in the first place, but if you do that your app fails. You include ads to help pay for development and ongoing expenses.
Offering a subscription to remove them for those that want to is secondary to that. Very few people actually subscribe to anything at all unless they absolutely have to. You’d be surprised to learn how few users actually pay to remove ads–like oftentimes less than one percent
That’s not the only alternative.
Do bless me with your knowledge, then. Donations don’t work. You don’t want ads. You don’t want subscription fees. People hate paying for apps.
There is no other option other than working for free.
Donations work. The dev clearly has many loyal fans willing to pay. Look at Jerboa/Lemmy’s donation pages. It’s good money.
Besides this I’m not even saying the dev shouldn’t do it. I’m just explaining that I don’t like it.
I gladly donate to FOSS software devs because the product never forces me to log in for a feature or get a key or see an ad. The app doesn’t get any of the bloat required to do that stuff either. I just don’t want to use Sync and it’s not because I’m cheap
It’s good money.
The Lemmy dev is making around 30k a year. Subtract taxes from that and he’s making maybe 25k (at best).
They’re very clearly extremely talented software engineers, and you’re telling me $12 an hour is “good money”? That’s not even above minimum wage in many US states! Do you have any idea how much software engineers make?
People can complain about Sync if they have something to complain about.
Okay. I have something to complain about, too. It’s people complaining too much about Sync.
Well I’d like to complain about people complaining about people complaining about Sync >:)
I get complaining about the price, I get being a FOSS diehard, but there are are a handful of accounts that are so insanely mad about Sync and commenting/posting about it so much that they genuinely can’t be mentally well.
Imagine caring what app other people use.
You’re not a real Linux user unless you bitch about other people’s software choices
Idk, half the apps look like they are just a fork of one app including sync. Why pay for an app that is mostly just a reskin of an open source project.
What? Lol. I’ve used Sync for almost 10 years now and have seen it evolve. How is it a fork of another app?
It just looks like every other lemmy app. They all look the same with a few things changed and their talking points are so similar from app to app. It’s almost completely impossible to decifer the differences without trying them out. If it wasn’t a fork I wouldn’t know because they are so similar on the play store.
If anything, the Lemmy apps would look like Sync, because obviously Sync has existed way longer, even before Lemmy was even a thing. The more likely reason most of them look the same on Android, is because they’re following some (sometimes older) form of Material Design, the design standard for Android.
It would be easier just to imagine a generic social media app than to copy sync. It would look similar too because sync is pretty generic in feature set, like all social media apps are in feature set. Besides I pay developers for making a good app not paying the developers to make it a good app.
Jebora for the Win!
Paying to limit myself from the freedom that comes with using a browser?
If I like it better then who are you to tell me I shouldn’t pay for it. Like it doesn’t affect you, as long as I support my home instance everything will be fine.
Nobody was talking about you but go off.
I see your point. My bad. Just don’t like how people are trying to make us seem like we are the bad guys for using sync
It’s your phone, do what you want with it. Funny that in the weeks leading up I saw so much love for Sync and the instant it dropped there was a massive shift. Maybe because of the Play Store privacy section? Lemmy is every bit as vulnerable to bandwagoning as Reddit. In a week nobody will be talking about it.
The shift was from:
- Only way to remove ads at launch was the ultra subscription ($2/mo or $17/yr)
- Once a one-time payment for ad removal (not ultra) was added, it cost $20 which is higher than people were expecting. It started out cheaper and rose once or twice throughout the day.
- The one-time payment for “ultra” as added late in the day and costs $99 (the Sync for Reddit version was $30)
I’m personally torn because I really like Sync and I believe the dev should be paid for their work. IMO Sync is far and away the best app for Lemmy at the moment, and it very likely always will be.
The problem is $99 for an app is very steep. If that’s the price that makes it worth the dev effort and lower userbase, so be it, but that doesn’t make it any less expensive.
There are lots of FOSS lemmy apps out there with dedicated developers that are ad and tracker free (shoutout to Connect). They aren’t as polished as Sync. However, almost all of them have only been around for a month and have seen an astonishing amount of improvements in that time. Who’s to say they won’t eventually match/beat Sync?
Speaking for myself, it feels weird to be forking $99 over to Sync for porting their app over from Reddit when I’ve never donated to any instances, any other 3rd-party lemmy apps, or to lemmy development itself. I’ll probably donate to those things eventually, but paying $99 for Sync before giving money to those other parts of the lemmy ecosystem just feels out of order.
I’m holding out to see if the one time payment for Ultra drops in price. In the meantime, my adblocker (dns66) makes it so I don’t see any ads anyway.
It’s not $99 for the app though, it’s $20 for sync ad-free, which is reasonable for a crazy polished app like this one. The $99 gets you a tiny bit more functionality they provide extra based around a subscription model because recurring revenue makes sure you always have the funds to further your project. I don’t necessarily agree with this sentiment, but I also don’t need any of those extra features.
Also, sync is just the beginning. Many more apps will follow. If they still think that price is reasonable, then so be it. But $20 is very fair IMO.
As someone who has never used Sync, what are the features in Ultra to justify a 5x increase in price?
