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 $2.13 every month. I understand everyone needs time away sometimes but I don’t see how LJD feels right accepting people’s money while providing ZERO support for months on end, and never bothering to at least appoint a maintainer in his absence.
I see issues piling up with this app and I’m forced to look at ads while LJD does whatever he wants and takes my money. I feel stupid that I’ve been paying this man for years to provide a good experience just to be taken for a ride like this.
I had bought the lifetime pro back in the Reddit days, I paid for pro subscription while using Lemmy, and at this point I’m just done. I hate writing this post because I’ve been a happy, continual premium user of this app for literally years, but there’s only so much I can handle.
Obligatory LJD tends to disappear intermittently before coming back with a major update. I’m not saying that you should be happy with it, but as a longtime sync user I’ve come to accept it because homie always comes back with a banger update, historically.
I appreciate that and I’ve been using Sync since 2019, it isn’t like I’m brand new to the app or his proclivities. I don’t think this is a good excuse for completely abandoning maintenance and user issues for months on end with zero accountability for it, just because every so often he does a big update.
I was fine with that until I realized Lemmy is relatively young software and breaking changes will come up.
Edit: I cannot view comments on anything posted to local communities
You can use revanced to block the ads.
Or set your dns to dns.adguard.com
I bought Sync 14 years ago for Reddit, it was a one shot payment. Same for Sync Lemmy, I bought it once for like 20$ and that’s it.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
