this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
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I'd given up on lemmy because every so I had tried was unfinished and unpolished. I tried sync and finally felt like the user experience wasn't getting in the way of content.
I'd love to support foss, if a genuinely comparable experience existed.
I'm glad to say that sync has revived my interest in lemmy.
You should check out Thunder, even if you gave it a try at some point - it's super polished and it's gotten even better week after week. In my opinion it has the best compact mode of all the lemmy clients, as long as you don't mind swipe actions!
I was using Thunder last week until Sync's open beta got approved and the User Experience and the interface of Thunder is nowhere near Sync. It's a night and day difference, and a difference that would have made me use Lemmy less and less.
Thunder is like a month old - it's still growing and will continue to improve with the community's help :) if you think anything could be improved, definitely shout it out on the GitHub page!
I understand that it's new, and it is definitely the best FOSS Lemmy app out of the dozens that I used. But it has a very long way to go to achieve the same level of User Experience that Sync has. It's not even close and I don't think anything bar a major UI/UX rehaul could fix that.
Not OP, but I've tried thunder. It's OK. Sync is light years above all other clients I've tried. (same with reddit as well) swipe actions? Sync is the king of swipe actions.
I mostly meant if OP was interested in FOSS :) Sync has been fine too in my short time with it today, but personally I'm still quite taken with Thunder. Excited that all the Sync fans are excited!
Me too. I'm sticking with Thunder. Its so close.
Back in the reddit days, Apollo had the best swipe actions out there. Sad to see it gone
Never used Apollo (don't use ios) so I wound assume that means Apollo and Sync swipe actions are the same.
IMO FOSS has really great offerings when it comes to libraries or other highly technical code.
But something about either the community or incentive structure results in sub-par UI/UX. Obviously not a rule, but definitely a trend I've noticed.
Don't forget the community's reaction to comments like yours, why down vote him if he's stating the obvious? FOSS projects often focus so much on technical features because everyone wants to flex their code-fu, but nobody gives enough time to UI/UX. Just look at pretty much every Lemmy web frontend, fugly webpages with early 2000s look-and-feel, usually slow and/or buggy, and with little to no user feedback.
I've seen it for years and years now, and I can only conclude that it's down to the kinds of people who are attracted by these kinds of projects.
They're tech literate at a professional level by necessity in order to engage with these things at an early time in their development, and this seems to drive a mentality that makes UX design kind of an afterthought, since they already know how to do the things they want the software to do, and they're not focused on how less tech literate users will handle it.
Then you add in the small minority of gatekeepers that wind up in every community, who feel that a larger, more generalized userbase would be invading their niche community, and you end up with stuff like the Linux forums where asking a simple question would get you a series of remarks that essentially boil down to "go fuck yourself, you should know how to do it already."
I feel like the people concerned with UI/UX come into these kinds of projects later on after they've matured a little, rather than right from start, and this causes resistance to their changes because the userbase is already entrenched in the current UX, especially from the gatekeeper folk in the community who see a higher tech literacy threshold as a good thing.
Lemmy is just new. The best desktops that exist are FOSS.
That's very subjective. I have yet to find a Linux desktop I like as much as MacOS, especially when it comes to WACOM drivers. The stylus response time/curve almost always feels wrong.
Also, I've worked with designers who can get something that looks and feels fully professional on a first pass, so it's not just newness for Lemmy.
FOSS doesn't need your support. You misunderstand the relationship. FOSS is looking out for you.
I see the upvotes but I cannot support this comment. FOSS could use a lot more support at every level, including users.
Username checks out. Wait I know this face from masto - I think I follow you!
Seconded
It's been one year of this conversation, but I just found it now.
Sync has also made me use Lemmy more often, but I was still missing a good web environment until recently when I started using photon. It is the best web experience I had using Lemmy and now I'm using as a progressive web app.
Photon repository here! Give it a star or start contributing to it.
Memmy is gr8
Good for you, I personally prefer Thunder