this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
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Liftoff!

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A mobile client for Lemmy running on iOS and Android

founded 1 year ago
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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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[–] [email protected] 95 points 1 year ago (16 children)

You have other free and amazing options that sync has no advantages over. They are all just as good, if not better.

  1. Liftoff
  2. Thunder
  3. Jerboa
  4. Connect
  5. Voyager (my favorite so far)
  6. Infinity for Lemmy. Early development, but still free and no ads

I don't get why I would go for sync, get tracked, watch ads or pay a monthly subscription!

[–] [email protected] 84 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Hard disagree. I find Sync the best user experience so far, including the best looking UI hands down

[–] [email protected] 45 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I've been using Voyager until today. It was a fine app, but anyone who thinks it holds a candle to Sync is off their rocker. Sync has more features, runs far more smoothly, and looks a hell of a lot better.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Exactly. I don't think many of the people who are claiming Sync is no better than others have actually used and thoroughly explored Sync, even for Reddit.

The customization options are incredible. Beautiful UI. Backup options. Filters. Settings that are fine tuned, and separate per account. It feels like years of work and polish, compared to weeks or months for others. Others work fine (fan of Liftoff), getting better, but I'm blown away with Dawson and Sync. The "ad outrage" is disappointing and silly to me at this stage (literally day one).

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well the years of work is literally that. Sync for lemmy is based on sync for reddit base. Or so it seems

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yes, just trying to say the years can actually be felt, and it's an almost unfair advantage, but fantastic for users. Also yes, it's indeed a full replica with all the features of Sync for Reddit, incredible for day one. Boost will probably have similar advantages.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Same with Jerboa.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I prefer Infinity

(Sadly the Lemmy version is not stable yet)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It isn't? I'm on it right now, works totally fine

[–] HedonismB0t 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah, same here, seems to working very nicely.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I was in the same boat, but I find Connect pretty similar to Sync's usability.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago

Yeah, the free apps have really raised the bar. I think there's a lot of passion out there for the fediverse and non-corporate social media.

I haven't tried Voyager yet, but it sounds like I should give it a shot!

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Lol, claiming that Jerboa is just as good if not better than sync is wild!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Isn't that down to what one individually consider "good"?

I find notepad-style text editors better word processors than Microsoft's online Office system. It's not because notepads are technically better or more visually appealing. It's because I value not being tracked more.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Nope, every person on this planet has to have the same preferences as this person. We all have to like the same thing, ya know.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Yup! That’s why nobody can like whichever client they prefer. Having different opinions is completely incomprehensible and utterly baffling. Why wouldn’t everyone love the same set of 6 apps?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Fucking sick bastards.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

What does liftoff have that the others don't?

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (4 children)

For one, it handles account switching much more smoothly than most apps I've tried.

While viewing a post, commenting, searching, or posting, you can choose your originating instance from a drop-down. Most other apps have to reload your feed and/or relaunch.

It's been really helpful for me whenever an instance is bogged down or acting funny, and I can just hop over without losing my place.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Yes, this is really handy every time world gets attacked. I still have my world account set as my main, but it's super easy to just switch over.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Oh man I didn't even see that in the menu. That is handy.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Does Liftoff offer keyword filtering or blocking instances at the account level?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Liftoff is great, it's true. Sadly, it lacks the only feature I'm after : hide read posts on scroll. Saw requests for this not being answered, so I guess it's not coming.

Great app I admit, but a hard pass for me because of this.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'd love this to be added too.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I want it to scroll to the comment in the post. I'm always manually trying to find the context of a comment by scrolling and looking.

I mean when you get a notification about a response and it takes you to the comment. It just shows you the comment. And then you click on Show Context. And here I was hoping it would scroll to the location of the comment in the post.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

A better question is, what does Liftoff lack that others don't?

I miss being able to hide posts, for example.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

In Sync settings under View Type, you can enable the option to hide a post from the main feed view. In fact, there's a lot of additional features that can be enabled and customized, the options menu is enormous and it really can be customized to your personal preferences.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Fucking love Infinity. Amazing what the devs are doing in a short amount of time

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

thing is, with all you list (and sync) the key thing is there is CHOICE

Nobody is forcing anyone to use Sync. If you don't like the model it uses, then use something else that better fits what you want. People in this thread are acting like its compulsory to use sync.

BUT. what sync will do is bring people over from reddit. Sync for Reddit was hugely popular and there are tens of thousands of people that used Sync for years that had not shown any interest in Lemmy. Sync will bring some of those to this community which can only be a benefit to everyone.

Don't like it, don't use it.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Infinity is coming? Is it similar to the reddit version? And where can I see updates for it?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Yep! Here's the website where you can find it right now: https://codeberg.org/Bazsalanszky/Infinity-For-Lemmy

You can download it from the Releases section manually or install and keep it updated with Obtainium

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I tried adding it to Obtanium, but it says "could not find suitable release"

[–] beppi 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Enable the prereleases slider

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

This solved the issue, thanks!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Hmm, that's strange, I'm on version 0.13.22 of Obtainium and my phone's architecture is arm64v8a, what's your setup?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's already out, but it still has lots of references to reddit. There's even still a ui for giving out awards

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Summit (#1 in my heart), also lemmotif is in early development but has promise.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Whoa summit is pretty nice. I've been using Connect but maybe not anymore.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

ROFLCOPTER

claiming these are just as good as sync just tells what you expect the apps to do

but what I've seen and (a lot of the other posters) is that sync is a whole lot smoother than all these apps and is the most feature-rich client

if getting tracked is your main problem in using sync, just use nextdns or pihole to block connections to google servers or pay up (currently only using google, I wish there was some other way)
I've read sync for reddit stopped connections to google after paying up

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Holy shit! Will everyone stop with the "smoothest" and the "most feature rich"? Have you actually tried other apps? Liftoff, thunder, connect and voyager literally run circles around Sync. It was slow as shit. Come on. It's just another app. There is absolutely nothing special about it that warrants paying for subscription. And ads and tracking on a platform that has been built on not having neither of those???? You have got to be some special kind of moron to accept this app.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I used Sync for a long time on Reddit, but there didn't seem to be any free clients (with no ads) there.

I like "no ads" a lot more than I like "a very slightly better UI", and the free ones for Lemmy offer enough for what I need. I don't know what a paid one could offer over that to convince me to buy it.

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