What's wrong with using a browser to view Lemmy? Seems like a lot of posts are about best apps for Lemmy. Am I missing out on something by not using an app?

keenkeeper@lemmy.world to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 141 points –

First post. Majorly a lurker on reddit, and now that I've switched to Lemmy, most likely will continue to stay a lurker.

I know I can download and try all the apps to see what the difference is but I'm curious as to how many people just use their web browser or mobile browser?

Since I'm new, I have no interest to figure out what apps would work for me as all my time is used to figuring out Lemmy, and absorbing the contents.

Would it be a better experience to use any app to learn how to use and navigate Lemmy? The idea of using multiple apps at the same time to find what I like more seems overwhelming.

Edit: typo

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Apps are generally more optimised for phones, and thus work a little bit better (with the exception of www.wefwef.app). But if you like the website, you don't have to use apps.

wefwef might be a webapp but it's very mobile optimized (: feels almost native and it's just like Apollo

The only thing it's missing is haptic feedback, would've been perfect if it got that

And it’s trustworthy with my username and password?? 🤔

every app needs your username and password to log in? and it's fully open source on github..

I took a leap and I’ve been using wefwef all day (and I love it)!

However, just because the source code is on GitHub doesn’t mean that the wefwef server I’m connecting to is running unaltered code straight from GitHub.

Hosting my only server may be the only way to be certain my credentials are protected.

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What does this mean? Wefwef is amazing, easy to install, and provides one of the best Lemmy mobile experiences right now, in my ever so humble opinion.

wefwef is a progressive web app. It's something inbetween a native mobile app an a traditonal web app u would load in your browser(aka the user interface of your homepage). They have certain advantages but also disadvantages like performance and dependemcy on specific browsers etc. Basically everything you download from app stores like Google play are native mobile apps everything else runs in a browser or some container of it (roughly summarized)

I know. That's one of the things I find so amazing about it. It's so fast and snappy for me, even on a low end, $200 Android phone. Most PWAs I've used are pretty janky, even from big companies. I like that it stands out as the lone Lemmy PWA as well. It's easily accessible (can be installed in Firefox and its derivatives, Chrome, Edge, Safari (most Chromium browsers? Not sure) and is platform independent. I even put it on my Windows PC. With Windows snapping, I can put it over to be half-screen, and it's a perfect feed for me, with its own icon, that I can just leave open. I did give up trying to make it work in Desktop Firefox though, and used Edge because it was so easy. I would rather I was using FF, but I like Edge enough anyway. Then you get sidebar search as an added bonus to search things and not be taken away from Lemmy to do it.

Even on wefwef it’s very noticeable performance wise though. Swiping back to the feed from a post is very sluggish among other things.

Apps can also be customized a a very granular level (post font size / text font size / color / compactness). The initial theme for Lemmy was terrible with regards to whitespace. I needed to scroll a mile to see 10 posts.

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