I’ve also cross-posted this post on other third-party apps’ subs:
EDIT: Forgot to write a bit of an introduction of myself, hello to everyone here, long time redditor and someone who also happens to mod a lot of subs on reddit such as r/electricvehicles, r/trulyunpopularopinion and etc!
Though I love to moderate and contribute to this communities meaningfully, I never liked reddit, as a huge FOSS fan, and these recent API changes are freaking stupid as well, there wasn’t a better reason for me to not consider moving to Lemmy. I will be speaking with a lot of other reddit mods in my own mod teams and some other friends, hopefully I can bring some subs/people here.
Speaking of bringing people, please do consider checking out these posts I’ve linked above, and consider upvoting them if you agree, this situation with third-party apps are a great opportunity for Lemmy, hopefully it reaches to the devs, and even if not all apps make a move, even one would be a win.
Thank you!
EDIT 2: Hey guys! I missed some third party apps on the list above, just updated them, and the new added ones are RIF, Joey, Get Narwhal and RedReader. UPDATE: Added ReddPlanet.
Please do consider visiting those that I just added and upvote them, so hopefully they can reach to respective developers!
and as a user, I can’t see paying for an app/subscription or using an app with ads when the website works well on mobile. Good luck to those devs though, I hope the ones that get most of their income from it can find new projects.
Which website are you referring to? I tried old.reddit on my mobile and fonts are so small (apparently it’s the desktop website) that posts were barely readable. And if you use the new reddit website (which pretty much sucks IMHO), you could as well use their app, because it’s literally the same (app might be a bit better in terms of usability). But the UI and the ads are pretty much the same.
The commenter above me is talking about trying to get some of the reddit 3rd-party app devs to come to lemmy and I was talking about the lemmy website on mobile, definitely not reddit. My experience was the same as yours in that regard.
While there are valid reasons to prefer a dedicated mobile app for lemmy, I think that the reason there were so many for reddit was that reddit’s mobile site was so terrible and so is their app.
That said, I’d still love to see some of these reddit app devs switch to making apps for lemmy(or kbin or other federated sites, possibly one app could do more than one type of server) because I think it would bring more attention and users here.
I paid for Relay Pro after trying a bunch of other apps. Mobile web sites can generally work well enough but I almost always prefer an app, because they can better incorporate mobile UX patterns/elements to make better use of the small screen. For example each post is wrapped in a tile with the headline and thumbnail displayed and I can swipe an individual post to see the controls (up/down vote, open link in browser, go right to comments, etc). Even on the mobile site theres too much clutter.
I definitely don’t like clutter! and that was the one of the biggest issues with reddit’s mobile site. I am trying out jerboa for lemmy on my android, just to compare. And I do hope more devs will work on lemmy clients. But for now, the web interface is a very usable fallback when compared to other mobile websites.