It’s been rough since 6/30. I can barely browse and leave comments in my .world account. I’m sticking to .ml for now.

Here is a list of Apps coming to Lemmy:

https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/t/71764

Plenty for iOS to chose from, Christian’s legacy continues. Memmy and Mlem both feel pretty close to Apollo - and are both directly inspired by it.

These apps are in early beta. They have constant updates (daily for Memmy and weekly for Mlem), so you can kind of see them being built in real time. If you’re patient with the developers, you’ll get that Apollo experience very soon. It’s like 80% of the way there.

Liftoff is pretty cool too, though it’s a different design approach.

(I’m using Memmy now, actually.)

Which app?

They are two different apps with different developers/contributors and different visions.

There’s huge difference in where each are in their current stage of development, but keep in mind both of the apps will look & act completely different in a few weeks.

Mlem’s beta test has met it’s 10K user limit, but there’s still room Memmy. Give it a try. Join the Discord after and talk to the developers/contributors about what you think - they’re very responsive.

Commenting from the Memmy App beta for iOS.

Still early days, but it’s doing the basics quite well. They and Mlem are hoping for a 6/30 App Store release, so interesting times ahead.

Unironically, Ellen Pao was the best CEO Reddit’s ever had.

She made a lot of difficult and fair choices for the future health of the company.
Reddit needed to be cleaned if they wanted to attract a larger audience and increase ad revenue. Heck, that was her job - and I believe banning hate subreddits was appropriate. There was expected blowback, but I suspect that’d be smoothed over in time.

The mistake was dismissing Victoria. That completely destroyed the beloved AMA format. It also coincided with the infamous Rampart disaster. 10-15 answered softball questions, and Harrelson treated it like another press junket. I mean, why wouldn’t he?
There was no Reddit ambassador to explain how the format works, what makes it successful and why it’s important for the success of what they’re promoting.

More importantly, it validated Reddit’s belief that Pao was not fit to lead Reddit, because she didn’t understand it. Much of the community thought she was only brought aboard to placate accusations of sexism in the organization. It didn’t help.

And still, Pao was big enough to admit when she’s wrong: We screwed up. Not just on July 2, but also over the past several years. We haven’t communicated well, and we have surprised moderators and the community with big changes. We have apologized and made promises to you, the moderators and the community, over many years, but time and again, we haven’t delivered on them. When you’ve had feedback or requests, we haven’t always been responsive. The mods and the community have lost trust in me and in us, the administrators of reddit.

What do you think the odds of a narcissist like u/Spez ever holding himself the least bit accountable? If he’s not fired, he won’t.

But ya know what? Fine. Let him follow in Elon’s footsteps and see what happens.

Spez started the site to make money. This was always true - a completely typical reason to start a company. When there was no community in the early days - he made fake accounts, and fake conversations to generate traffic to attract attention. So Spez is someone that’s always used dishonesty to get what he wants.

Aaron joined the site because he saw it’s potential as a tool for civic engagement and political awareness. He left when he saw what Reddit was becoming… or really - what it always had been: a tool to extract wealth from its unknowing volunteers.

Aaron and Spez weren’t friends. They were business partners for a very short period of time. To the best of my knowledge, that’s all there is to it.

I speculate that Aaron would feel unfazed by what Reddit looks like today… because it’s expected. The founders are people that make the Forbes 30 Under 30, marry world famous pro athletes, and are worth tens of millions of dollars. They’re divorced from reality.

I would hope that open and decentralized online spaces like Lemmy reflect the sort of values & ideas Aaron spent his life advocating for.

The average user has poor tech literacy. I mean, the pandemic began over 3 years ago and still people have trouble managing Zoom. “How do I share a screen? Where is the calendar invite? Oh woops, I didn’t realize I was unmuted!”. These are otherwise smart people. That’s why the best apps are super simple and idiot-proof.

I strongly believe that a good Lemmy does not need to explain the federation.
It should not use the word ‘instance’, ‘server’ or any of that jargon outside of advanced settings. All that’ll do is scare away new users.

All the app needs to do is say, “Hey, you want to connect with communities sharing memes, news and fun stories? Well - download this app!”. Let the app point them to a list of communities they might like and keep it at that.

The user doesn’t need to know they’re commenting on Beehaw or lemmy.world. All they need to know is they’re chatting about a cute kitten or whatever.

Please keep in mind that Reddit was around for almost 10 years before an App was created.
I’m sure the developers of Jerboa are working hard for a full & stable release, especially before Reddit’s 3rd Party Kill Date of 6/30/23

The best option for Android will likely be Tildes App by the ‘Reddit is Fun’ developer. Source. While Tildes is not Lemmy, it does Federate with it and you’ll be able to access Lemmy.ml communities.

Swipe to Vote app applied for TestFlight approval today for a beta test. I’m not sure if this will be iOS only or have an Android counterpart.

I’m using the beta for mlem on iOS - but there is no Android version.

My understanding is the version I’m beta testing now is actually pretty far from where they already are. Might be an update to the beta later this week.

mlem is planning a stable iOS release by 6/30, and using Apollo for inspiration. You won’t need to wait long.

They’ll be back here again in 2-ish weeks when Apollo and RIF are done.

And when mlem and other apps start rolling out for Lemmy, we’ll start seeing shifts. Apps that have proper accessibility, a clean UI, lack advertising and don’t eat data. And they give you the same Reddit experience without Reddit’s predatory business strategy.

When the blackouts stop, a lot of users will be able to search for Reddit alternatives and will find Lemmy… through Reddit.

I mod a sub with 65K users or so, I plan to go dark indefinitely. Also considering Read-Only with a sticky redirecting here. I know I’m not the only mod.

The Digg > Reddit migration wasn’t overnight. It was fast, though.

Before Netflix, there was Blockbuster.
Before YouTube, there was Metacafe and janky websites hosting Flash or Quicktime Player.
Before Spotify, there was PeopleSound and iTunes gift cards.
Before Discord, there was IRC and AOL Chatrooms.
Before Facebook, there was MySpace and Friendster.
Before iPhone, I had an LG Dare and Palm Pre. Good god!
Before Reddit, there was Digg, Slashdot and Fark.

Something better always comes along. Especially if that “better” is tied to a streamlined, easy to use, easy to learn UI.

Reddit would’ve never gotten as big as it did without third party support. Not just apps like Apollo, RIF and Narwhal - but tools like Imgur and RES.

Lemmy and “The Federation” (I’m not quite yet sold calling it the Fediverse…) has a lot of potential to be that “better than Reddit” online space. Nobody owns all of it, so there’s safeguards against the things that we’re blacked out.

And it’s partially why its a fixer-upper.

We, the community, are going to need to make Lemmy the space we want it to be. That means competition between instances and servers, that means user generated tools and content. I read the RIF developer is working on a Tildes app for iOS and Android. Mlem iOS app is in early Beta, but are working hard to have a stable release for 6/30. Jerboa’s out on Android already and folks seems to like it so far.

Give it time. We’re all new. And whether it’s here or somewhere else - we always land on our feet. Maybe the only thing we have in common with u/spez : there’s nowhere to fail but up.

Lemmy doesn’t have a real app yet. I just tried using Mlem and can’t even figure out (if it’s even possible?) how to browse communities I’m not a part of, or even find a list of those I’m subscribed to. I just get a feed of either ‘All’ or ‘Subscribed’.

“Fairly simply once you get the hang of it” isn’t good enough. If you want people to use your service, you make it idiot proof.

Lemmy needs some work, but it’s definitely got potential.