1d ago

Lemmy clients

lemdro.id The sense of loss from the fediverse hits hard sometimes

So, I was lurking using sync for Lemmy and I came upon this post.

What happened to the development with these apps? I'm not that active on lemdro.id or other instances. But apps like Sync and Boost have been updated in a year or 6 months respectively. With Boost I'm not surprised Mayo tends to be slow. I was more shocked with sync. My question is do you guys have any recommendations for other Lemmy clients?

Edit Please do not harass the devs.

Edit 2: I'm testing out thunderbird.

72 comments

I love Sync but I can't really blame the dev. They obviously wanted an income from this but there just aren't enough people on lemmy that would use the app, so it's maintenance mode at best.

https://github.com/Bazsalanszky/Eternity

Raccoon is also nice.

(Disclaimer, I'm one of the devs.) Thunder is cross-platform and very actively developed! There was a release two days ago. We keep up with Lemmy API changes and we're constantly squashing bugs and adding new features. Check it out!
- I am very interested in Thunder, especially considering it's open source. While it does seem packed with features, I'd love to see a bit more customizability though. I might submit some feature requests some day but looking now there are nearly 200 issues as it stands. Not a complaint, just an observation. Keep up the good work!
  
  Thanks for checking it out. Yeah we do have quite a backlog of issues to work through. Obviously we prioritize bugs and the most popular feature requests. Feel free to submit an issue any time you want though! It may be that we can help come up with a workaround that gets you what you want. Otherwise sometimes if its an easy change one of the devs will knock it out quickly. But if nothing else it'll be there for other people to react to. :)

Sure this is cursed but I have been turning the official Reddit app into a Lemmy client

Too many clients for too few users...

However I'm happy with eternity
- Hasn't development slowed to a crawl?
  I am using eternity to post this btw. Was using liftoff before until it broke and will continue with eternity.
- Me To!
  
  Me Thre

Sync was almost always like this - the Dev takes long breaks and then updates the app with lots of good stuff. He did this since reddit days, so I'm really not concerned
- He probably has a day job
  
  And family stuff, probably. Totally understandable.

Boost
- Boost here as well....why it's missing from the lineup is a bit odd. I figured there is a good number of people using it.
- 🚀

I'm using Connect and it's fine. The dev sometimes pushes updates that break things but the patches come quick enough.
- There are dozens of us
- It's an extremely familiar app experience as a very long time Redditor. The app works great.
- Also a satisfied Connect user here.

I've just started on Lemmy very recently, but I've been trying out different Android Lemmy clients. I'm currently on 'Voyager for Lemmy' which I installed from F-Droid, and personally this has been my best experience yet
- Voyager is a fantastic experience imo. I tried other clients like Jerboa and a couple others I can't remember the names of. The others were always a buggy mess whereas Voyager actually just worked. Dunno if the other apps eventually improved, but I wasn't personally keen on sticking around through their significant growing pains when Voyager already existed.
- I tried a few other clients as well and settled on Voyager in the end. The experience is great, it's being actively developed and the dev is active in !voyagerapp@lemmy.world. Can recommend!
- FYI, voyager started as a hyper performant webapplication namef wefwef
  https://wefwef.app/
  I still have it as a shortcut on my phone as a backup to the official app
- ~~Voyager is a good client but it's a variation of infinity which with Infinity I don't really vibe with. Its not a bad client just not for me.~~
  Sorry I'm thinking of eternity 😅. My bad

Definitely thunder. I've been using it since it was in early alpha and it has improved so much and works really really well.

The only good apps are Thunder on Android and Arctic on iOS, change my mind
Edit: Eternity is pretty great as well, I used to use Infinity on Android back in the Reddit days
- What's wrong with Jerboa? Been using it since I left reddit, seems perfectly fine to me.
  
  I tried it over and over, found the UI and UX to be pretty poor, and the app is pretty buggy. It had an issue for months that caused comments to sometimes be posted twice or more, it was incredibly annoying.
  
  Jerboa was the first app I tried when there were essentially no other Lemmy apps. It worked ok in the very beginning, but then went horribly jank and turned into an almost unusable, buggy mess. Voyager was being developed at the time (then wefwef) and switching to it was like a breath of fresh air. It actually just freaking worked and wasn't a glitchy mess as opposed to the other apps in development at the time.
  If Jerboa has improved a lot since then, then that's great! But I'd wager that I'm probably not the only one who was deeply turned off by this during its nearly broken phase of development. Voyager just worked and continues to just work, so I haven't had any reason to try to switch back.
- I use Voyager on Android.
  
  I know that this is stupid and petty, but I dislike Voyager, because it's essentially a web app. I prefer native or near-native apps (things like Flutter or React Native). I tried it out and it's pretty nice UI/UX-wise, but I still prefer Arctic on iOS, because it's an actual native app written in SwiftUI, and thus closer to Apollo for Reddit (which Voyager tries to imitate).
- I've been very happy with Summit on Android.
  Edit: changed link to app website
  
  Summit has been the closest in look and feel to my beloved old baconreader (RIP).
  Summit is such a nice app I haven't even considered changing in over a year.
  
  Summit is severely overlooked. Dev fixes many bug reports same/next day as well.
  
  It's unfortunately proprietary :(
- What about raccon for Lemmy and connect?
  
  Never tried Raccoon, but I used Connect for a while, it's not bad, but unfortunately proprietary :(

I finally made a full switch from Sync to Thunder, because even though I know that Sync dev does take huge breaks and he comes back and fixes everything and makes the app even better, I still wanted to make sure I find a good alternative and get familiar with it just in case.
Thunder is a really good app, especially considering its age. It also has the most features and the nicest UI (IMO) among the Lemmy apps. And it being open source is a huge plus too.
Sync is still my favorite, it just feels really nice to use, but I'll stay on Thunder for now.
Voyager is also a really nice app that feels polished and works smoothly, but it's lacking certain features that I like. So I keep it installed as a backup but I don't use it often.

Eternity is the best
- I enjoy eternity as well, but its also been a while since any updates were published.
  
  As long as it works, I don't see a problem not receiving updates so often

Not sure, I've been using Interstellar with Mbin and it's been pretty great. Would recommend, responsive dev, works well, supports multiple platforms!

I miss Liftoff
- Never heard about it. What was so go about that client?
  
  It was the app most like reddit if fun (rif). I liked it. To me it was the most intuitive layout.

You should try [Thunder] (https://github.com/thunder-app/thunder). It is available on Izzysoft. Its is FOSS (AGPL) but I don't know why it is not in official f-droid repository.
- We are working in getting it in F-Droid!
  https://github.com/thunder-app/thunder/issues/347
- I use Thunder too, I like it. But you accidentally added a space in the first hyperlink, so it's not rendered correctly.
- Ok il look into it. But f droid has been funky for a few months now.
  
  You can also get it from the Play Store, or directly from GitHub via Obtainium

I've switched to using Jerboa from Sync and it's absolutely fine for my casual usage and it doesn't have ads, which is a big plus point.
- Yeah I tried a few others, and since Jerboa is FOSS and official, I just stopped trying other apps.
  The only thing I wish it could do is share a post as an image, like how Apollo did.
- Jerobs is awesome!!

Eternity

Connect.

Voyager has been good. They just implemented a custom emoji fix to that ensures emoji are the correct size regardless of their uploaded size.

Boost works fine
Left Sync for it, temporarily, until Sync is back to updating. It's been like this back in the Reddit years too.
- I remember boost taking it's sweet time. But sync always updated more regularly.
  
  ljdawson was always gone for months back in the day. A year is a long time, but I'm not that surprised. The only reason it's a problem is because, unlike Reddit, Lemmy isn't really stable.
  Both Sync and Boost are stable apps, so to speak. But it is a problem when the site itself gets a lot of stuff updated. The app devs need to sort their schedule out tbh.

I was using Etehnity, but I had some issues with it and recently started using Raccoon instead, which has been pretty good.

I started with Voyager and eventually moved to Mlem, which has given me zero issues thus far

72 comments