Appreciation post for Liftoff not collecting user data or injecting ads.
Appreciation post for Liftoff not collecting user data or injecting ads.
I was looking forward to trying Sync today now that it's live, but my enthusiasm was immediately dampened after seeing the "Data Safety" section on the Google Play store.
Liftoff has been great, and want to say thanks for making an awesome app. This will continue to be my daily driver.
Edit: for clarity, because the post got way bigger than I expected.
Sync looks like a fantastic app, and the dev/s should charge whatever they feel is fair for their efforts, even if that's through the usual ads + ad tracking.
My intent was just to post here in /c/Liftoff to thank the Liftoff devs for managing to somehow offer an awesome app without any of that.
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lil reminder that this was posted to the liftoff community. the sheer volume of comments echoing the same “fuck you for complaining, you’re wrong” sentiment would really make you wonder. it’s not like you wandered, drunk, into their community and started shit talking sync.
coincidentally that does seem to be what most of the sync-stans in here have done, though.
I'll play devil's advocate. Let's look at some facts and the timeline.
Sync for Reddit has 1,000,000+ downloads, according to the Play Store listing as of writing. It has existed since ~2012 and is well established as one of the best Android reddit apps. To put that number into perspective, that's roughly one Sync user for every 2 posts on Lemmy (https://lemmy.world/post/2581495).
Liftoff is a brand new app created for Lemmy. Further, Lemmy itself is just becoming known. There aren't many people here.
Sync announces and releases the beta of Sync for Lemmy.
Everyone who has Sync for Reddit installed still gets a notification that Sync for Lemmy is available.
Sync for Lemmy becoming available means that many more people are about to sign up.
The topic of Sync for Lemmy, regardless of whether it's positive or negative, is at the top of Lemmy's "All" in multiple posts all week. That is happening on a lot of communities, this post on Liftoff being one of them. Naturally, people who enjoy sync are going to see these posts and will want to voice their opinion. Can you blame them?
I think it is disingenuous to assume malice in the sense that sync-stans are actively searching for negative Sync posts like you are claiming.
Adding in my personal bias: I think the majority of the anti-Sync conversation is rooted in gatekeeping newcomers to the fediverse. Which is really, really unfortunate. But that's the kind of attitude that exists in online forums like this so that's what we'll get.
I am using Sync and will continue to. That's my personal choice. Everyone has their personal choice and that means others should fuck off about that choice. This goes for both sides, but I think it's more important for the anti-Sync crowd to hear because right now it seems like they are the ones who are truly up in arms about it all.
OP here, and I honestly didn't expect this post yesterday to get so big, or to cause a debate.
Sync looks fantastic. Ads and ad tracking stuff isn't abnormal and is totally up to the devs, but I just wanted to express my gratitude here in /c/Liftoff for managing to offer an awesome app for free, without any of that.
to be clear, i don’t think they’re actively searching. the “drunken wander” bit is specifically aimed at people who got here from an “all” or “local” front page, but then started engaging without acknowledging or even noticing where they were, much like a drunk might do after wandering into someone’s home lol
i do love the response though, very well thought out and structured. thank you for being so constructive on such a hot-button topic.
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honestly i think a lot of it is just growing pains, for a huge swath of users this is a new and potentially confusing environment lmao
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I've used liftoff, connect, Jerboa, voyager, and sync. For me personally, sync is easily the best app functionally out of all of them, followed by voyager. I liked liftoff better than Jerboa, but stopped using it and went mainly to using voyager because of how liftoff handled messaging which I found frustrating and confusing. Idk if they've changed it since then, but that ship has sailed for me anyway since liftoff doesn't offer anything I want that I couldn't get from sync or voyager. I didn't use connect much because it was very buggy for me so I can't really compare it to the others. Voyager is my next choice after sync, but it still had a lot of issues that I haven't experienced with sync so it's still only my second choice.
I'm biased, since I've liked sync since I used it for reddit, but I'm not a stan by any means. I'm waiting to see how things play out since the app has only been available publicly for a day or two. Personally, I think if someone wants to make a salty post in the liftoff community about another app that isn't liftoff, then it's only fair that people who use that other app can share their own opinions in the comment section of a post on a public community, particularly when the post specifically brings up that other app as a topic.
Yeah, there is this feeling of a weird cult movement from them where daring to not use Sync or criticize anything about it is seen as an affront. I could understand the reaction if this was posted on the Sync community. They leap to accusations of you must not pay for anything you cheapskate as opposed to not understanding that some just don't support the current model, so don't use the product.
There's lot of products that are better than alternatives, but people choose to not use for whatever reasons. Like dare I say it...reddit still when it comes to niche communities.