A RULE SPY'S IN THE BASE?!

🏳️‍⚧️Mia🏳️‍⚧️@lemmy.blahaj.zone to 196@lemmy.blahaj.zone – 519 points –

I searched up "Lemmy" on the PlayStore and noticed that Reddit appears right before the last lemmy client in that search X3 do u guys know if there r any other lemmy clients worth trying? I randomly felt like trying all I could find and for now I'll stay on Jerboa and the Web UI but I use Voyager too now, mainly for DMs

Edit: I apparently wasn't clear enough but I was asking for OTHER clients that aren't on this list X3 but feel free to share why u use an app in this list if u want anyway :3

192

why do people use boost? heard it has ads in it. not to mention it collects and shares data. it baffles me why anyone would use it over something like voyager. (also its a proprietary app for a FOSS project)

I use it, it's great. No ads since I paid for it. Of course it collects and shares data, by definition as it's a client to third parties platforms.

many other lemmy clients don't collect and share data like boost does, bud.

I used to use boost for reddit so I was excited it was coming for Lemmy until I saw all the anti privacy aspects of it.

By the time it and sync finally launched. There were so many great foss apps for Lemmy that it made no sense to use one that tracked me.

The tracking disclaimer is the standard message you get when an app uses Google ads. Pay for it and there are no ads, and by extension no tracking.

Then you don't understand the fediverse my friend. These "clients" are monetizing something that's free.

Nah it's fine for people to make money off of their work, i even support sopuli.xyz continuity

No man I get the point of paid apps. I don't think it should collect and sell data. That's the poison pill with this whole deal.

It's my understanding that Boost don't serve ads, and doesn't track data, if you pay for it.

The point is it doesn't, it serves ads if you don't pay. It doesn't sell data, just uses google adsense to serve ads.

The other point where it collects and shares data with third parties is when connecting to third party servers (lemmy). That's it...

Free software != free of charge.

Nothing about free software says you need to give it away for no cost, nor that anyone can't do it. You can charge $100 for a simple calculator program that is under the GPL for its code. Nothing is there to prevent you from assembling the code and making it yourself, or from the buyer from copying and sharing the program. It's just way way easier to show off the program for free as in price and freedom for most programmers.

It's why the people who made Debian/Slackware/Ubuntu discs could charge money for an otherwise free product. Because the programmers openly allow this.

And programming is itself labor, just a lot of free software devs don't worry too much about getting paid for it.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html

Except for one special situation, the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL) has no requirements about how much you can charge for distributing a copy of free software. You can charge nothing, a penny, a dollar, or a billion dollars. It's up to you, and the marketplace, so don't complain to us if nobody wants to pay a billion dollars for a copy.

The one exception is in the case where binaries are distributed without the corresponding complete source code. Those who do this are required by the GNU GPL to provide source code on subsequent request. Without a limit on the fee for the source code, they would be able set a fee too large for anyone to pay—such as a billion dollars—and thus pretend to release source code while in truth concealing it. So in this case we have to limit the fee for source in order to ensure the user's freedom. In ordinary situations, however, there is no such justification for limiting distribution fees, so we do not limit them.

Sometimes companies whose activities cross the line stated in the GNU GPL plead for permission, saying that they “won't charge money for the GNU software” or such like. That won't get them anywhere with us. Free software is about freedom, and enforcing the GPL is defending freedom. When we defend users' freedom, we are not distracted by side issues such as how much of a distribution fee is charged. Freedom is the issue, the whole issue, and the only issue.

The point I was trying to make (and I should have made properly) is that paid software has a free tier supported by ads. It being paid is just a trigger that makes me think "are they injecting google's code in their product". And if they are then your data IS being collected without your consent or knowledge by Google. (Same goes for any other "ad" provider). Who knows what the google API call takes?

I paid for it

the fact you pay for something that is utilizing FOSS software is crazy. its not like they are even hosting their own instance. they're just profiting off of open source devs.

They're paying for the use of the Boost app that the developer themselves created though? If they were charging for a Lemmy server I'd understand the point but they're paying for a client that they don't have to pay for. If it brings more people over to Lemmy then we all benefit really.

I also paid for Boost because the UI beat out all the other clients that I tried, replacing Connect which was my favourite at the time. It felt the most like Relay that I used to use on Reddit.

It's the anti privacy/ ads i really have issues with. I don't think there's anything wrong with paying a developer.

by definition as it's a client to third parties platforms

It doesn’t have to collect data at all. Voyager and many other clients do not.

Oh yeah, the notice on the app store is for the ads, which gets deactivated once you pay for the app. But other than that using a service of a third party means sending information to that service even if not called that by an app store.

Boost is the best app I've used. I'm not a fan of voyager

What aren’t you a fan of on voyager?

(I’m aware the android UI needs work, it’s on the list.) 🙂

imagine using propriatary apps with tracking to use the foss decentralised social media ;w; these ppl blackpill me so much

Loving all these "its great after i spent like $25 on it" comments lmfao. Connect is 10/10 no ads

I like it because of the clear read function, if there're other apps with something similar that'd be neat

2 more...

was shocked to see boost and sync at 50 million downloads, but mil is just thousand in the language you were using haha

LMAO Srry about that X3 it confuses me too all the time cuz I usually have apps in English unless their main language is Spanish (so, always X3) but a few r in Spanish either cuz they wont let me change the language of just that app or I forgot to check if they do :p

I use sync and I used it when it was a reddit app. It was funny to join Lemmy while hating on sync was trendy.

I use sync too but I wish the developer actually seemed to give a fuck. Seems he took all the initial money and bounced. I know he comes and goes but people pay for this app and it should be maintained properly.

I'm on sync.. What are the issues? Also I think the team works on his sporadically, it's not a main thing, more like a hobby thing.

There is no team and there is a bug tracker to see the list.

Which is why even though I left Reddit because of Sync I didn't buy it again at the now much higher price. I got used to Jerboa before Sync was ready, and it's almost as good (for my use anyways) and free.

Way back when it released I said that the dev was charging so much upfront that he probably doesn't expect lemmy to take off. He even responded to my comment saying he was going all in. I guess I was right in the end.

He left for months at a time with Reddit too, always citing some personal troubles. When he quit his full time job to work on Sync and still disappeared, my trust was very shaken.

I think I remember people talking about Sync a lot but didn't pay attention to that, why were they hating on it? I tried it yesterday and it seems pretty cool and has some neat features :3

I think a big part of the hate came from the fact that the developer was charging for a premium version. Lemmy is all about open source, power to the people kind of things, so I imagine this rubbed people up the wrong way. Plus it was a fairly popular reddit app, and people were hating on the reddit refugees as well.

Do you remember RIF? And that time reddit forced all the third party apps to change their names by adding "for Reddit" at the end? So RIF changed the name to "RIF is fun for Reddit", that is "Reddit if Fun is Fun for Reddit". Good times.

RIF is short for RIF is fun, not Reddit is fun because at a different point in time, Reddit didn't want other clients to have the word reddit in their name.

RIF is fun is fun for Reddit, then?

Still better than DC comics' Detective Comics.

I use Voyager because it was the one with the latest update on F-Droid.

Jerboah is also very recently updated.

Btw fdroid just builds the apps. It is often better to use the APKs from the release pages of github etc. so that you only need to trust the devs. It is also way better for security as FDroid uses the same signing key for every single app.

Obtainium works okay for that, you enter the URL and it finds a lot of sources. It is completely overcomplicated though.

I'm not sure I agree on the trust thing. I prefer to trust a single source of curated apps, rather than many individual developers. I like to imagine that f-droid would remove a malicious update before it gets to my phone.

Nobody reads the source code of those apps. Thats basically an audit, and it may happen sometimes, but it is not a requirement for F-Droid.

They do some general tests, but the "antifeatures" are either by the officially stated permissions or by opt-in in the F-Droid submission. Creators/packagers often state the reason for the antifeature in the README, which means they are the person placing the tag, or know the process.

Google Play has sometimes good, sometimes bad requirements too. Those APKs are signed by developers, but the final product also by Google afaik, its some mix.

You need to trust the devs anyways, thats the point.

Play Store? Boooo

jk

Boooo indeed :< But I've been looking into Obtainium and it sounds awesome :3

You can also try droidify if you want an easier one click install like play store

I searched it up and apparently it's an F-Droid client? I already have F-Droid but tbf I do think it's kinda ugly X3 but Droid-ify does look so good! ty for the suggestion :3

F-droid is a service. They get submissions for building apps, some people gather the needed stuff and the app is build on their servers.

Meanwhile app developers 90% of the time build their apps themselves, with their own signing key.

The F-Droid app is outdated, use "F-droid basic" as weird as that sounds. That is build against modern libraries.

But I use that app now only for searching for apps. You can add repos and you get new apps shown easily, then I open the app page and down under "source code" with a long press I copy the source code.

That you can enter in obtainium and it downloads the official release of the Dev instead. Turn off everything automatic update/download in F-Droid.

You can get every app through obtainum, also from external repos, but there you need the app ID and the repo URL which is hell of a pain, I use F-Droid basic here too.

Obtainium is not ready at all, especially as it has no feed for the repos. But it works.

Ohhh yeah the app does seem ugly and buggy sometimes but I guessed it just had a small team or whatevs X3 thank u for all those tips! :D

What app? F-Droid basic has the best UI of all I think, just the search button is kinda random.

Obtainium is okay but overcomplex without a reason, its core has a lot of potential though and with a feed and one-click installs it would be really good.

Nono I mean the regular F-Droid app, I haven't tried the basic one yet

Basic has the same UI but modern hidden stuff

Oh well, I just personally dont like it :3 but that Droid-ify one does seem prettier to me! haven't tried it yet tho

Droidify also has a list of preadded repos you just have to click on, I think I also submitted a list of Links to add. Thats nice and will never end up in the official client.

With the trust model, using Izzyondroid and external repos is best as those are often apps made and signed by original developers. But as its not complete, I use the f-droid store just for search and copy the source URL to obtainium

The Raccoon logo is awesome. 😎

Downloading now just because of that.

LOL U're welcome X3 It looks pretty great but for some reason it's super laggy for me?? If u tried it did u have the same issue? Like, everything I tap takes a second to open

No, feels quite snappy, although my phone isn't the most recent at all.

Somehow it doesn't keep me logged in, though. It is under active development, so I will see.

Really like the layout. Wish the threaded view were a bit clearer, maybe. Bit that's no big deal.

Is there a (Lemmy) community for that app?

There is a Lemmy community here:

!raccoonforlemmy@lemmy.world

Yeah I think that was an issue with my phone, I asked someone else and they also didn't have that issue, and they didn't mention a log-in problem so maybe we all have different bugs LOL X3 But yeah it does look pretty good :D And ye I think there's a comm for every lemmy client :3

I was just thinking the same thing! I'm going to go download it now.

i use thunder and eternity, eternity's my fav bc of the ui customisability an seperating downloads into folders per community. but also thunder just cuz it looked cool an it works :3

Thunder has an awesome sharing feature.

Eternity is my backup.

Oh right! That downloads feature sounds so neat tho I very rarely download anything from lemmy but I bet it's great for people that download their fave memes or whatevs :3 and yeah cool+works r the main things I look for too X3

I was using Eternity for a while, mostly because I used Infinity on Reddit and it's a fork of that. But it's still not feature complete and it hasn't been updated in ages, so I'm on Voyager now.

Oh that sucks :< Was it abandoned or something? It at least didn't seem broken when I tried it but I didn't check when it had been updated or anything

It's mostly working, but there's some minor stuff that doesn't work well.

No idea if it's abandoned, or if it's just going through a slump, or if I'm just impatient.

Progress is slow but they didn't abandoned it You can check the repo.

What features are you missing from Eternity? It seems fairly stable and feature complete in my experience.

Minor things, mostly. Like, animated gifs don't animate in comments, video links don't always work, etc

Im still using eternity untill this day although dev seems very slow progress in git compared to other apps but i can assure this apps rocks
Tbh why i used this apps in first place bc it can open redgif videos inside the apps not redirect it to browser apps

I tried searching for keepass2android yesterday and none of the results on the Play Store were the app. There was one old icons pack, the rest was just something else.

Is that app shadow banned or something? I can open the app page if I follow a direct link

Please use fdroid, search for apps there, copy the source URL and use it with obtainium

Started using fdroid last week 😅 but hey, keepass2android is not found there, too ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Installed Obtainium, will set it up

Why not use KeepassDX? Its better afaik

I do now, it's just that I didn't know about current state of affairs and last was choosing a manager more than seven years ago

If the developer unpublished the app, it won't show up in search results, but the direct link will still work for you if you previously installed it.

Maybe that's it, although ey publishes updates, so I thought it's not the case

You can still update unpublished apps.

I understand, it's just that I thought that the only reason to unpublish would be abandoning an app. I was too pessimistic in that regard

huh that's weird, maybe it's just not very popular and u get other more popular results that technically fit ur search? That has happened to me before when looking for not-very-well-known apps but I find them after scrolling down a bit

Yeah, I thought so, too. Then I opened a list of apps by that author:

There's no app ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Suppose it's some regional bullshit, but maybe also something else

I ran into this exactly, but it turned out to be device compatibility. I could never find it in the play store on the (x86) Chromebook, while it always showed up as you'd expect on the arm android.

Been pretty happy with Connect coming from RiF

RiF was one of the clients that just died when the API thing happened right? I remember people being sad about that :< Oh well, glad u found a new home in Connect and Lemmy! :>

I think it's funny that Connect is in third place with a 5.0 rating and 10 million downloads, and yet nobody talks about it the way they do Jerboa and Sync and Voyager.

It's a great, simple client. No ads. Totally free.

ye LOL X3 I guess there's just less Connect users here for whatever reason, also maybe there's more people talking about Jerboa and Voyager cuz I mentioned them in the post's content

I use Thunder and previously I used Voyager. Both are amazing open source clients for Lemmy!

I tried Thunder because of this post, it appears to be great so far

Definitely recommend Thunder, somehow it does swipe actions better than other clients I've tried (and the UI is very clean)

Its sad that apps build on foss services which pushes ad and tracking have more downloads than better foss apps

Yeah I hate when that happens... I used Boost for Reddit cuz I don't remember why but I liked it way more than the others and oh well, it's Reddit anyway X3 But using it for Lemmy felt silly now that I had an excuse to move to a more privacy-friendly alternative

I've only ever used Jeroba. It's what I picked first and I like how it's fairly simple and straightforward. I used Now For Reddit before the APIpocalypse and really liked that interface even if (or perhaps because) gif support never happened for that app. I'm open to trying something else though, especially if one has an easy crosspost feature.

Well this post's comments have some neat suggestions! :D (tho that's not what I was asking for, everyone is talking about the clients I already know X3 but that's fine :3) So u could try those out and see if u like them :3

Also gif support didn't occurr to me, I wanted to have a gif as my banner but it didn't work at all, maybe that's a Jerboa issue? And I can't remember if gifs work in posts but I think u need to tap them to open them in fullscreen and then they start moving

Gif support isn't a problem on Jeroba, that was just an issue with the Reddit app I was using.

50 million downloads? Is lemmy really that popular?

No, it's 50 000. It says mil, which means thousand in Portuguese (and in Spanish and Italian, if I'm not mistaken?) imo it's confusing, because Google likes using 50mil when it's 50 000 and using 50M when it's 50 000 000.

It's kinda depressing I'm not even in the list...

Well whatever, I still use my app daily

What app is it?? :o That's why I made this post, to find more lemmy clients, but so far out of the 150+ comments only one has told me of a client I didn't know of and I can't install it for some reason LOL X3

I use eternity because it's made from infinity

Pity it has a weird bug where I'm unable to load any user's profile/posts/comments. It just kinda shows with no activity. I'm in Jerboa for now

Redo the login

Done that a bunch of times by now. It kinda needs to after a few days of use or it starts acting weird. But for some reason it always fails to load user posts/comments for me.

I just realized I haven't been on reddit since sync closed down.

Yea kinda funny how I thought I would still want to use Reddit after moving to Lemmy but I just never opened the app and ended up removing it :p Same as with Windows when I moved to Linux years ago! X3

I think it's been like 8 months since the mass migration thing? maybe nine?

Fun fact: Eternity for Reddit was named after it's update schedule

I switched between all of them for months, but I end with Raccoon. It's simply the best.

This is my first post with Raccoon. Sleek little thing. 👽

Will testdrive it for a while.

Yeah Raccoon seemed so cool! :D but everything I pressed took like a second to open and that was so annoying, did u ever have that problem?

Been using Voyager for a while since jerboa would crash on startup, both are good but I think Voyager is my favorite now.

Jerboa doesn't seem to crash, though you will need to restart if you lose WiFi and then proceed to reload c/all

Tested Raccoon and its basically like Jerboah but worse with too big UI, missing features and bugs.

Jerboah forever! Its the most stable Lemmy client and also full featured.

I dunno, Raccoon seemed cool to me :3 It did feel similar to other apps but in a good way, but it's super laggy on my phone for some reason, apparently other people here dont have that issue but someone did have a different problem so I guess we all get a different bug at random LOL X3

Thanks, I'll look into it: does it happen only in some screens (e.g. community detail or comment detail or settings) or in general the whole UI is lagging?

Oh hi Raccoon guy! :3 I think it was certain UI elements that took like a second to load, like if I tap the three lines to open the sidebar where I can log-in and stuff or the little icon at the other side to sort posts or the all/local buttons inside the sidebar, that's all I could try rn without logging in but I think it also happened when going in and out of DMs

What features are missing that you would like to see? Apart from the text size, what are the other bugs you found? I just ask you to take a couple of minutes to answer, I think the project is very poorly maintained but no one's voice has ever been ignored.

Lots of dialogs where a bit messed up, for example the answer or the report one. Not sure. It was mainly that text boxes appeared on wrong places, too low or high and the rest was black.

Not sure tbh, cannot give a good report sorry.

Missing:

  • view absolute ratings like jerboah (not only the final score, like 100+ 200- instead of just 100-)

Ok the drop downs I see. thanks! As for the vote format, you can choose the "separate" option to split positive and negative votes:

My only problem with Raccoon is that I can't make post titles large and the comment text normal. Everything is either too big or too small because there's only like 1 setting for all the text.

I really wish the dude who started Liftoff would give us an update or something. It's pretty damn perfect but it won't work with 0.19+ of Lemmy currently and it still has an issue where it repeats posts all the time.

Be nice if RIF became LIF. I liked RIF.

Hi and thanks for trying it out! I have been working on content font sizes (there were some rendering problems I realized) but I'm curious about having different dimensions for different parts of the content (currently there are two options, one for the menus/buttons of the app, the other for posts and comments). What more fine-grained control do you think would be useful?

What more fine-grained control do you think would be useful?

Post titles, body text, comment text, and usernames would be ideal.

Seems legit! Thanks for answering so quickly I can definitely work on it! let's see if in future releases it improves. ty! 🙏

I use Eternity because Jerboa's scrolling was fucked up for me for months.

Tried Eternity, was a blessing for Reddit but I dont think I need it for Lemmy

Summit

ooo I think I had seen that one before! or maybe it used to be a Reddit client and that's when I saw it? I can't find it on the PlayStore and if I go to it from my web browser it says it's "not available" :< might either be a regional thing or maybe it's not compatible with my phone tho it should specify so in either of those cases as usual

Im a boost stickler, used it for reddit, using it now for lemmy

Edit: i think im going to try sync now, it also used to be a reddit client

I was a Reddit-Boost user too! :D but when I moved to Lemmy, Boost hadn't moved yet so I tried Jerboa and honestly no other app has convinced me to change since :3 except for the Web UI for the missing features in Jerboa (which seems to be a design choice??) and Voyager for prettier DMs, I could just use Voyager but I like the look and feel of this one :3

I started on Jeroba and switched to Connect. I like the UI much, much better. It does seem a little slower though and it crashes everyone in a while. Generally happy with connect though.

Sync is my favorite

Sync does look very neat yeah :3 Did it not have a premium version or something? or maybe it did at first? Did u pay for that or is/was the free version good enough?

You can pay 20$ to remove the ads from within the app. The ads never bothered me. I used to have Sync for Reddit and that one I had paid like $5 to remove ads. But I think the developer had stopped updating it for like a year before sync for Lemmy came out. Maybe not enough incentive

The dev hasn't updated it in a bit and it's getting more broken for me, especially with loading certain image types. I did pay for ad free on it when it came out but I'm starting to get a bit frustrated with the issues lately.

Can only recommend b Boost, I used it for Reddit and it's pretty nice for Lemmy as well. (Still missing the 'mark read on scroll' feature though)

Yeah that was neat on Reddit :3 I think it's also missing the ability to sort by New Comments? either that or hiding votes, I think that was one of the reasons that I chose Jerboa over it for X3

Comment sorting works on my end, hiding votes I haven't looked into.

(don't quote me on this, but I'm pretty sure the mark read on scroll is in the works)

nono I meant sorting posts by New Comments, so when there's a new comment in that post it gets pushed to the top like bumping in forum sites that dont have voting :3

Ahhh ok, yeah, it doesn't do that, although I'm fine with it highlighting new comments.

ooo like making those comments a different color or giving them a little icon so u see which ones weren't there before last time u were in that post? Jerboa just tells u how many new comments there r in a post but doesn't highlight them :< that would be neat! :3

Update: there now is read on scroll!

Arctic is my jam.

ooo looks neat! but iOS-only apparently? :<

Yeah, sorry lol. I’ve heard Voyager on Android is good but I’d probably download Raccoon for the app icon lmao.