First I want to preface that I actually never used Sync for Reddit, I always used RIF but I wanted to give Sync for Lemmy a shot and see what it was all about.

A few things from my perspective:

1. So I'm using the combined BottomNavigation style, but finding settings or other options doesn't seem all that intuitive. Some of the things, like how to switch from Everything to Subscribed for my feed, I found by accident. Where to buy the Ad removal was also rather hidden, etc...
2. The elephant in the room... Pricing... as a developer myself I get needing to make enough money to sustain your projects, and I get that there's a lot less users on Lemmy than Reddit, but the prices for the subscriptions just seem outrageous. The problem as I see it, is that there's already a healthy competition for Lemmy Apps out there today and most are completely free and have no ads as-is. Some may even be operating in the red, but still $2/mo, $17/yr, $100/lifetime still seems a bit much for essentially:

• No Ads (I've got a PiHole, so honestly I don't see any ads at the moment anyway)
• Cloud Backup -- backup of what? My login? My app settings? The former seems concerning, the later I don't see much value as I only have a single Phone. If I get a new phone, sure it might save me a few minutes re setting it back up. There's not that many settings at the moment that needed customizing. And adding too many makes the app too confusing.
• Highlight / Tag users -- Ok this seems interesting but not quite worth $2/mo IMO.
• Translate text -- I can do this in the web app already just by highlighting a comment. But to be critical here, /most/ of the content is already in English, and I don't subscribe to any foreign language communities at the moment, so this at least doesn't have any value to me.
• Select text from image -- Ok, another interesting feature but still not quite at $2/mo
• Push notifications (coming soon) -- I'm really wondering how this is going to work personally, but this is a much needed feature, at least just for private messages. Probably the feature I'm most excited about.
• Import / export subscriptions -- This honestly needs to be built into Lemmy itself, but there's also a handful of user scripts and other tools other developers have already written that can do this.

Keep in mind I don't have a frame of reference for what the prices were in Sync for Reddit, but cut the prices to about a 1/3rd or 1/4th of what they are now and they seem to be more inline with the value that the app provides over the other apps.

3. The privacy policy. It's a lot longer than I'd hope for a Lemmy app. I'm assuming most of the data being collected is for advertising, but it's still concerning to me.

I don't mean to sounds critical in all of this. The app is probably one of the smoothest and best looking out there so far, but the value to money ratio just isn't there.

Not necessarily. I have several servers behind Cloudflare for free. I'm just limited on analytics, some advanced firewall settings, advanced cache management and maybe a few other features that I don't use. But the basic service is free.

https://www.cloudflare.com/plans/free/

Unless you have an account there's no easy way to get access to the content on the page. Once you have an account there's technically nothing stopping you from just saving the HTML file to your computer.

Something else you can try though, assuming you don't have an account, is to just turn off JavaScript. If the site lets you partially load the content and then asks you to create an account to read more, they usually just block the content by having JavaScript add an opaque overlay. With JavaScript disabled, obviously it's not there to add the overlay and you're able to keep reading.

Check out my post history.

But https://www.search-lemmy.com. It has a few bugs but it should work for you. Especially if you set your home instance to something large like Lemmy.world.

Edit: if you want to help contribute: https://www.github.com/marsara9/lemmy-search

https://www.search-lemmy.com/

https://www.github.com/marsara9/lemmy-search

It only works for Lemmy, for now. And please feel free to post any feature requests or bugs to GitHub as it's still fairly new.

You can also check my comment/post history for more details.

Ya, now if everyone can stop finding bugs! So I can take some time off. /jk

See one of my other replies. But that was a thought originally. Just hook into the original database instead of crawling using the APIs. Problem is, the table structure required to search is much different than that of a community form. At least if you want to do searches quickly. It takes me almost 5-10 seconds just to process 50 posts at the moment, and I'm doing those in batches... but ya maybe in the future I can talk to the Lemmy devs and see about merging these two projects?

Best one I heard so far has just been "Lemmy Search" or "Let me Search".

You'll be able to get an initial set of data from federation but you won't get any data beyond that.

Federation works via "pushes", but since your instance would be behind a VPN the other instances in the federation wouldn't be able to see it to push content updates.

Sadly not yet. I'm in desperate need of a fronted dev, as the HTML/Javascript needs some serious work. But if I can't find someone soon I'll see what I can get put together and get it up and running soon enough.

Anything pushed to the "fediverse", if you will, can't be lost (except for images and other media). It's just that once an instance goes down, that instance isn't available anymore to push out new updates. So if someone replies to a post or comment that belongs to a community that "no longer exists", then that reply will only exist on the server of the user who posted it.

Short answer -- nothing.

Longer answer -- Those communities, posts and comments will still exist on the other servers, but sadly interacting with them will not federate that data to other instances anymore, since the host instance is no longer active.