"Buy Me A Coffee"

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  • 139 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Correct. As I can only provide links to posts that are on your selected home instance. Eventually I’ll change this but you’ll get a 404 page for links that aren’t on your home instance, but see my P.S. below.

    P.s. there have been changes to the Lemmy API that have prevented me from getting updates for about a month now. So most of the results you’re seeing are from old posts only. Until I can rebuild the crawler or find a new API there won’t be any new content.


  • This is the same reason I had to turn off my search engines crawler.

    There were changes made to the API to ignore any page > 99. So if you ask for page 100 or page 1_000_000_000 you get the first page again. This would cause my crawler to never end in fetching “new” posts.

    lemm.ee on the other hand made a similar change but anything over 99 returns an empty response. lemm.ee also flat out ignores sort=Old, always returning an empty array.

    Both of these servers did it for I assume the same reason. Using a high page number significantly increases the response time. It used to be (before they blocked pages over 99) that responses could take over 8-10 seconds! But asking for a low page number would return in 300ms or less. So because it’s a lot harder to optimize the existing queries, and maybe not possible, for now the problematic APIs were just disabled.



  • Yep that’s the new idea. The sad part is that with this method there’s no way to get historical data. Only new posts. So if a server goes down, gets DDOSd etc… I’ll lose posts forever.

    Also building an ActivityPub implementation from scratch isn’t trivial either. So that’ll take some time.

    I’ve got a few other ideas I’m playing with as well. Like just assuming that internal post IDs are all sequential and literally fetching them one by one. Or maybe some combination of both?




  • Missing features are fine. Even then, and maybe it’s just me, but Push Notifications + User Highlight/Tagging doesn’t seem like $2 worth of value to me. Just trying to call out that the current value-to-cost ratio seems off. And sure there are other features and maybe other users will get $2 worth of value out of those, but in my opinion that’s why I won’t be buying a subscription, even if I want to support the developer.




  • marsara9@lemmy.worldtoSync for Lemmy@lemmy.worldPost launch day chat
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    11 months ago

    Totally understand that. And personally, $20 to remove ads forever, seems reasonable. But the other features under Ultra currently don’t add up to the price tag for those features at the moment.

    None of the current Ultra features really stand out to me except tagging/highlighting users. Push Notifications will be a game changer but they aren’t in the app yet.



  • marsara9@lemmy.worldtoSync for Lemmy@lemmy.worldPost launch day chat
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    11 months ago

    First I want to preface that I actually never used Sync for Reddit, I always used RIF but I wanted to give Sync for Lemmy a shot and see what it was all about.

    A few things from my perspective:

    1. So I’m using the combined BottomNavigation style, but finding settings or other options doesn’t seem all that intuitive. Some of the things, like how to switch from Everything to Subscribed for my feed, I found by accident. Where to buy the Ad removal was also rather hidden, etc…
    2. The elephant in the room… Pricing… as a developer myself I get needing to make enough money to sustain your projects, and I get that there’s a lot less users on Lemmy than Reddit, but the prices for the subscriptions just seem outrageous. The problem as I see it, is that there’s already a healthy competition for Lemmy Apps out there today and most are completely free and have no ads as-is. Some may even be operating in the red, but still $2/mo, $17/yr, $100/lifetime still seems a bit much for essentially:
    • No Ads (I’ve got a PiHole, so honestly I don’t see any ads at the moment anyway)
    • Cloud Backup – backup of what? My login? My app settings? The former seems concerning, the later I don’t see much value as I only have a single Phone. If I get a new phone, sure it might save me a few minutes re setting it back up. There’s not that many settings at the moment that needed customizing. And adding too many makes the app too confusing.
    • Highlight / Tag users – Ok this seems interesting but not quite worth $2/mo IMO.
    • Translate text – I can do this in the web app already just by highlighting a comment. But to be critical here, /most/ of the content is already in English, and I don’t subscribe to any foreign language communities at the moment, so this at least doesn’t have any value to me.
    • Select text from image – Ok, another interesting feature but still not quite at $2/mo
    • Push notifications (coming soon) – I’m really wondering how this is going to work personally, but this is a much needed feature, at least just for private messages. Probably the feature I’m most excited about.
    • Import / export subscriptions – This honestly needs to be built into Lemmy itself, but there’s also a handful of user scripts and other tools other developers have already written that can do this.

    Keep in mind I don’t have a frame of reference for what the prices were in Sync for Reddit, but cut the prices to about a 1/3rd or 1/4th of what they are now and they seem to be more inline with the value that the app provides over the other apps.

    1. The privacy policy. It’s a lot longer than I’d hope for a Lemmy app. I’m assuming most of the data being collected is for advertising, but it’s still concerning to me.

    I don’t mean to sounds critical in all of this. The app is probably one of the smoothest and best looking out there so far, but the value to money ratio just isn’t there.



  • Playing devil’s advocate for a bit… So these are just cross-posts. Which existed even on Reddit. …I assume they weren’t handled in any way in Sync or Reddit?

    But let’s say this is fixed… What to do about the multiple comments threads? How would you reconcile them with each other? Especially since the user can choose different ways to sort the comments as well. Would all of this logic normally handled by the Lemmy back-end now need to run on your phone? Also how do you choose which post / instance to actually display and which ones to hide?

    Btw, I’m not trying to dismiss the idea. Just want to call out some of the technical problems that might come up trying to implement such a feature. As well as ask questions to try and determine exactly how such a feature is expected to work.