Reddit app has ads to click between every few posts. Didn’t see them with the third party apps. Reddit has a premium you can pay to remove the ads but it was far more expensive and IMHO they want the money for themself.

For me I found the new Reddit desktop site completely unusable. I hated everything about it. On desktop I used old.reddit with RES.

On mobile their 1st party app was similarly shitty like their new desktop ui. The 3rd party apps were much better but I didn’t necessarily prefer then over the old+RES desktop website.

Main reason I also used mobile apps was that I could browse Reddit while taking a shit.

For pooping.

I’ve always used the browser, both on mobile and desktop. I tried several different apps but none of them supported tabs, so I couldn’t browse reddit the way I was used to and I quickly uninstalled all of them.

Plus, I couldn’t find anything wrong with using reddit in a browser. I was on old.reddit with RES when I was using my laptop and on the .compact version on mobile (until it was recently discontinued).

I’m oldschool, I used old reddit on the desktop, and when I was on my phone, I’d use old reddit, in a browser, desktop site.

Pinch to zoom was the massive feature missing from all the apps. My close vision isn’t quite what it was, so my optimal font size for detail reading is a bit bigger than for headline-skimming - and skimming with large fonts is a horrible experience; the information density goes to shit, and everything is whitespace.

So I want to be able to zoom on text when I want to read in detail, and out again when browsing. And I want it in one seamless gesture that I can change from second to second without having to think about it, not laboriously drilling down into settings menus and completely disrupting the flow. Pinch zoom in the desktop site did precisely what I wanted, and every mobile site or app goes to enormous lengths to disable it :(

I just don’t like any apps very much. They always feel claustrophobic, dumbed down and over-curated, like I’ve got a sales assistant breathing down my neck trying to sell me an experience instead of just letting me loose to browse. Let me see the fucking URL. Let me copy and paste whatever the fuck I want to, using the system facilities. Stop reinventing the wheel with UI and UX. It’s text, images and buttons; we have an app for that, it’s called a browser, and a million times the development you’ll ever be able to muster has gone into getting the interface general-purpose, effective and predictable.

Yes I’m genx, shut up.

I’m a desktop browser user as well. I can understand the draw to phone apps, but I only use mobile where I have to. I’m actually pretty old so I grew up on desktop and laptop PCs. Never been drawn to using mobile apps for much. I do have a proper Android phone and the only app I installed on it myself is Zoom though it came with a bunch and there’s a few others I use once in while.

Anyway mobile apps do a better job presenting content on the limited screen real estate of a phone or tablet. Though if you wanted you could access Lemmy from a mobile browser. It’s just not optimized for mobile and can actually be kind of painful. People have published website apps for desktop browser, but really there’s not much reason to use one. You get optimal presentation on desktop browser natively.

The ones for Reddit weren’t nearly as buggy as the official one. For example: the video player. The official app’s video player was absolute garbage. You would randomly hear audio from other random videos while scrolling, videos would refuse to play, and sometimes you would have to spam the play/pause button repeatedly to get through the video. There were a lot of other buggy aspects to the main app but this was one of the biggest complaints. The 3rd-party apps also had accessibility features which allowed users with disabilities to access Reddit.

The Lemmy web app interface is kinda weird on Lemmy and sometimes certain pages load a bit slow. There isn’t much wrong with it though. The 3rd-party apps just feel nicer to use.

Third party apps let you get the benefit of choosing exactly what works best for you and getting a setup you enjoy. Most of the focus by instance admins would be on ensuring everything doesn’t implode and managing fees, but third party apps have a pure focus on usability and dedicate all their resources to making the best experience possible and then the end result is usually way nicer.

This message is being written on a third party app, funny enough! Memmy to be specific.

I moved most of my daily computing over to a smart phone about a decade ago. I use a computer for work and a computer for gaming, moving the rest of my computing to a phone helps the brain. Reddits app sucked, their site doesn’t work well on mobile and constantly forced to open in the app. Third party was my only option, Apollo.

I’m using Wefwef (really don’t love the name) which is a clone of Apollo for lemmy. It isn’t as feature-rich at the moment but the interface is similar enough to make the transition easy.

Recall that 3rd party mobile apps came before the official Reddit Mobile app. For many people, especially Reddit’s oldest users, their 3rd party app was Reddit for them.

I would say a good mobile client’s user experience is indeed better than desktop. Desktop websites are second class citizens in this day and age.

Since I have two toddlers at home my time on the desktop is quite limited.

However I can easily check my phone while I’m keeping an eye on them

Yeah, it was and is a lot easier than desktop usage. I am lying in bed right now typing this with my phone while my desktop is playing YouTube videos. I am too lazy to pick up my keyboard and type this out.

I tried out the Reddit app for a few days during the protests, and it just fucking sucked. It was slow, buggy, and not customizable. Even in dark mode, it was too bright and gaudy for my tastes. And I had to install extra software to disable ads.

I used RiF, which was a bit like a more mature Jerboa with some features like swipe to hide posts, built-in username switching, saving post/comment drafts, and well-done integrations for embedded images and webpage links. Links I click in Jerboa currently appear in my browser history, whereas RiF opened up its own browser. Hopefully, Jerboa will add a WebView option.

More importantly, I felt like Rif was text based, as any Reddit client should be. The Reddit app uses icons where RiF would use a text field. As someone who has put in the time to learn how to read, and used that skill continuously for over two decades, it is annoying to have to freshly learn an app’s specific, increasingly abstract icons when we already have the ability to read text.

I came to Reddit for the in-depth text posts and comments. The meme communities were a nice side thing, but I was really there for the long posts, and to dump long posts of my own.

IMO, the standard Lemmy web app has more features implemented than Jerboa right now. However, I want to keep my Lemmy/Reddit history separate from my ordinary browsing. For both sites, the app allows my browser not to get cluttered with Reddit links. Jerboa currently opens up a canned tab of one of my browsers, but the browser doesn’t get info about every post I open on Lemmy, so it still does have a great deal of utility.

IMO Lemmy is really well designed from the ground up. The web app is pretty good, but I would simply rather not use it in my browser if I don’t have to.

Apparently, Reddit’s app and web interface were additionally inaccessible for blind people to use, so they resorted to 3rd party apps (although I don’t think RiF was one of their typical choices). Reddit has allowed a few select non-commercial accessibility-focused apps to use their API for free, but I think that the status of serving NSFW content to these 3rd party apps is tenuous. The concern was that for all practical purposes, Reddit unilaterally decided that blind people could not interact with NSFW content. Now I just checked /r/gonewild, an established porn sub, and /r/erotic literature, a text-based erotica sub, on RedReader. So far, it is fetching new content for both subs. However, I have not checked any other apps (other than RiF, which is just completely dead) or subs. Anyone with more perspective on the current situation for blind users, please reply.

Lastly, I didn’t moderate any communities on Reddit, but apparently, moderating through the Reddit app or their modern interface sucked. Somehow, the 3rd party apps had much better tools than Reddit’s own app.

For me, RiF was the “frontpage of the internet”. I’ll miss it, but Lemmy has given me hope for the future of the internet for basically the first time in my life. Jerboa is currently the primary way that I access Lemmy, so I am rooting for it’s success, as well the other Lemmy apps and Kbin.

A lot of people use reddit/Lemmy on the transit to work/school/university, and on mobile the official reddit app stinks, especially the video player. Other then that third party apps provide a lot of customisation, for example filters and different displays methods. What you see on desktop is a card view by default and list view when using the old website or compact view, on for example “boost for reddit” you could have cards, list, gallery and swap views. You could have a different view and filters set for each sub, set it so when you save the post it automatically up votes it and much more.

Basically it was mostly because people like to have something personal, customised perfectly to thier needs and wants while the official reddit apps just didn’t provide enough.

For browsing while pooping. Or, in Lemmy’s case, browsing while trying not to poop.