Have you tried Thunder? I’ve been using it since I finally got around to moving over here (admittedly not very long) and I’ve found that Thunder gets a lot right. It’s open source, ad-free, cross-platform, and nice to use. It doesn’t have quite as much polish as Relay but the design language is similar enough that it doesn’t feel like a huge departure.
I tried it a year ago; felt very much like an unfinished project. Too many missing features. Has it improved a lot since then?
I’ve only been on lemmy for like a week, so I have no point of comparison here. It doesn’t feel janky to me, but then I’m not a power user. It works well for what I like to do, which is view posts and comment. Images display well, I haven’t noticed any problems with video. I haven’t tried embedding images in comments yet, let’s try it with a photograph of the richest man in Indiana:
Give Thunder a second shot, or don’t. I’m not your boss, I’m just some drunk guy on the Internet.