27
votes
Best FOSS app for Lemmy?
I tried out Sync for Lemmy. Loved it, but I was not a fan of the tracking for ads and the price to get rid of that being $20. Anyone tried the free open source Lemmy apps? I used to use RedReader for Reddit, so I don't mind it being a bit worse than something like Sync.
Lift off is great. No ads and decent. Android.
Thanks! I don't mind paying for apps but I really didn't care for sync at all but I'm really liking this one so far!
No problem.
Just installed and it looks great, have no complaints so far!
Thats great. :D
Voyager (née Wefwef) is the gold standard of Lemmy apps in my book. It’s a web app, but it has a GitHub available and you can pin it to your homepage to make it into an app.
https://wefwef.app/settings
It's on the play store now too! I love it
Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.vger.voyager
App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/voyager-for-lemmy/id6451429762
I've just installed Voyager too, I've been using Connect and Liftoff mostly up until now, and I think they're both just as polished as Voyager, if not more so (but I'm more used to them than I am to Voyager, so I'm biased)
Edit: a letter
It’s no Apollo but it scratches that itch. Really makes you appreciate the differences between a native Swift app and a PWA. The fact that they were able to reproduce Apollo’s UI so quickly is pretty incredible though.
Both Jerboa and Liftoff are FOSS, IIRC.
Connect is actually my preferred app, so far, though. It's not FOSS but no ads or anything (yet).
Will try.
I've been using Thunder, it's FOSS, no ads, no tracking, great gestures, and I think it rivals even some of the best Reddit apps of yestermonth. Crossplatform as well (IOS/Android).
GitHub
Fair enough.
It's a toss up between Jerboa or Infinity .
Jerboa is more feature complete and stable, but you may find it visually outdated. Infinity is a fork another Reddit app, not quite as good as Sync and still in early development, but it's very customizable and looks modern.
I have tried them all (for Android) and my favorite is Voyager. It's FOSS, intuitive and as far as I know, self hostable (with limitations). The iOS style may put some people off, but they are developing an Android style too.
Here's the GitHub in case you want to take a look at it: https://github.com/aeharding/voyager
Why is it that you are asking on Tildes? Are you just looking for recommendations specifically from people who value discussion over easy-to-consume images, etc?
Some people do enjoy both though. There's a time and place for everything and perhaps the people who enjoy discussion are more likely to accurately describe why a product is good to them. That's the group I'd ask for recommendations any day.
Sorry for not having a suggestion; feel free to mark as off topic.
When I saw that the Sync for Lemmy app has trackers and ads, I was confused.
How is it possible that a for-profit company can develop a proprietary app to browse/use a FOSS project like Lemmy? Does the license not protect against that? And if not (as it seems to be the case), what could you do as a developer to shield your project from this?
To answer your question, each lemmy instance provides an API, which is a set of instructions on how to send and receive information. Writing proprietary software that interacts with that API does not need to be open source, since it does not need to incorporate any of the project's source code in order to send the data.
This is similar to how there can be closed source software on an open source operating system. The operating system provides several protocols to interact with that do not require implementing any of it's code.