this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2023
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What allows this particular piece of software to implement an egregious dark pattern and have it be ok?
Because although it is in a very early state compared with Sync for Reddit it is also a great product.
I use Sync for Lemmy, Voyager and Summit and overall I think Summit is a better client as of now, but Sync doesn't fall too far away.
What dark pattern for real lol, we users asked for it, the dev didn't even care nor know about Lemmy if it wasn't for us, he listened and now he is present around here with a very competent client.
Would the world be better for you if Sync ceased to exist LMAO.
Anything in particular I'm missing with sync?
Well, the latest version fixed the crash that I was having (pressing the three dots upper right when I was inside a post) so that's good!
I have some ideas in mind that Sync could do better, some of these are compared with Summit or other clients, or even Lemmy backend lol (be aware that probably some of these ideas are fixable for example using another view type, I couldn't tell because I always use "slides views" or it could be that I'm missing it because Sync already has tons of features lol):
The instance name doesn't appear next to the community name when you are inside a post (it is only visible on the feed), I think the same behavior occurs with the instance name for the username's poster, I think it is important to distinguish all the time who we are referring to.
Summit supports a limited version of "multisubreddits" even when I find it awesome that Summit's dev added this, I feel the better way would be to wait and implement it when Lemmy has this built inside its backend... Although I'm pretty sure Lemmy has a lot of more stuff to worry about currently lol.
I don't know if it is only me and I consume a whole lot more of content with Lemmy than Reddit, but with Sync for Reddit whenever I wiped read posts I didn't need to care about this again, at least in the current session, with Sync for Lemmy I am constantly hiding read posts and I even get a prompt saying all posts cleared from 1st, 2nds, 3rds pages etc. I think it would be nice if we could increase the fetching of new posts, so the hiding feature works better, we already see duplicated content here because of the way Lemmy works compared to Reddit, so that's maybe why I end up cleaning more posts than in the other site.
Indeed the only way I can use Lemmy is having the show read posts option disabled within the Lemmy web settings, note, all the other Lemmy clients I have tried suffer from a similar issue like this... Maybe except Connect for Lemmy, which has a similar approach to the Lemmy way of hiding such read posts, but client side like all the others (no hide read posts option/button, they hide automatically, so I kinda never compare it with others).
Which leads me to the next point, it would be nice to have a way to manage your Lemmy web's settings within Sync for a Lemmy, this is possible from some clients like Summit and Jerboa.
I think all clients suffer from this because Lemmy works this way, but IMO if you are using the Lemmy option to hide read posts, it shouldn't hide your own posts, they should be accessible all the time when you navigate to your profile so if Sync could have a way to whitelist this it would be awesome.
The new way to surf through instances is awesome, and I don't recall other clients to have it, I could be wrong, but I think it would be better if it did fetch locally the instances that are cached within your instance, or the ones you are subscribed to, instead of getting the banner to load locally, I suppose there is a reason why you implemented it that way though.
I'd like the legacy option to open in another window stuff to be more supported Settings shortcut: Post options > Long press cards to open comments in the background
Now that we can browse instances (which doesn't work with) this would be great and well this feature is very limited because it only works with two kinds of views types, I don't know why this is legacy, but I am using this very often.
This occurred to me with Sync for Reddit too, when writing a post, or a comment or anything that involves the keyboard and changing to another app or minimizing Sync when re opening it it would always dismiss the keyboard, I find this behavior not be the same with other clients, it is only a tiny annoyance to me 😅
I don't know why Sync doesn't show negative numbers (downvotes), only "0" it would have be fun to see the real votes for the Reddit AMAs lol
Those are my ideas, I think I'm not missing anything else, but as you can see not all these problems are Sync for Lemmy only, but it for sure would be awesome to have this working with this client.
Oh, and finally I gotta ask, how the heck did you manage to make Sync for Lemmy and Reddit to stick for so long in the RAM? I was using a custom ROM that handled my 6 GBs of RAM like if it was only 1 GB lol, and Sync would stay in the background like a champ, when all the others apps would refresh a lot, it was a true nightmare to browse Lemmy without Sync because of this feature that I never see mentioned, currently I ditched such a custom ROM and the new one handles this better, Sync still working superbly ofc, indeed when I used Boost for Reddit in MIUI I needed to pin the app so MIUI would never kill it (which is a neat feature if you ask me), this wasn't even necessary with Sync for Reddit even when MIUI is known to have a deficient RAM management.
Greetings mate!
That was actually caused by using old import files.
I've made a ticket for the instance issue: https://github.com/laurencedawson/sync-for-lemmy/issues/421
re: "multi communities" I too think its best to wait for a proper lemmy solution here. The only other way I can think to do it is to manually call the posts api n times for each community. Its not going to be a good experiene.
re: hiding, the solution sync has now isn't the best but I'm waiting for this to also be added on lemmy
re: web settings: there's an open ticket for this and I've just marked it as high priority. I'll try to get that added for the next release.
re: long pressing: there's an open ticket for this too
re: negative #s: I'm pretty sure sync displays negative scores unless I'm missing something here?
re: low ram usage: I try to make things myself, don't rely on libs and still use java!
So tl;dr most of your points are being tracked as open issues. I've prioritised a few and hopefully they'll be included for the next release.
Thanks for the detailed reply!
I should have known... I suspected about it though.
Yeah, I also think it would not be the best experience... I only mentioned it because Summit has it and Lemmy needs to fix lots of more stuff first before adding new features.
I think it is not the same that I meant? I mean I don't want to hide them entirely as you can with Reddit, I only hide read posts per session based (or that is what I want to accomplish), so what I meant was to be able to do this without hitting the hide read posts button too much.
It is very handy to handle all this client side because a simple refresh would bring back all those read posts hence you can see updates of such posts or whatever, as I'm using Lemmy implementation for hiding the read posts so I'm missing on that.
Hmm, it works for me with comments for sure, but posts all they stay at 0 votes, never -x
Should I interpret this as java being very efficient? 😅
Thanks for your feedback to my feedback dude! You are a pro!
The amount the world would be better if Syncs ads didn't exist would be negligibly minuscule to be sure, but it would be better. Every time someone was displayed an ad it made the world just a tiny bit worse. Even if it is the equivalent of a grain of sand on the beach. Perhaps overall there was a net positive, but my only point is that ads are bad and only doing it a little bit doesn't mean it is good.
Like killing one person to save 10 doesn't mean killing one person was good in of itself. The stakes are obviously quite low in the case of ads in this particular piece of software, but I still don't agree with it on principle. If all ads on the internet were eliminated then the whole experience would be greatly improved.
By what metric?