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.

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.

For pooping.

The main features of the reddit app I used (joey) that I enjoyed:

• More condensed/streamlined interface with less wasted space compared to the official app. Also much faster and more resource efficient with imperceptibly short loading times for text posts.

• Ability to set custom filters to automatically hide posts with a given keyword in the title or subreddit name from my feeds.

• Way better built in image/video viewer compared to the official app.

• Option to move the title bar to the bottom

• Subscribed subreddits shown as tabs in the title bar with the ability to swipe left and right to switch between them.

The feature I miss the most: anytime you opened a post or followed a subreddit link, you could swipe right to instantly go back to where you were like the back button in a browser. So if I clicked on the subreddit name from a post on the frontpage to open r/aww, opened a post in r/aww, and clicked on a link in the comments to open r/illegallysmolcats, I could then swipe right and be back where I was in the comments, swipe right again and be back where I was in r/aww, then swipe right again and be back where I was in the frontpage. And this stacked indefinitely so you could be 15+ subreddit links deep and still go back to where you started in a few swipes.

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.

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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 think ultimately it depends on what your use case is. Comparing Apollo to any web version of Reddit, there were already a few use cases which were definitely superior in my view:

• the video / gif player with supports scrubbing by touch.
• packaging comment chains into screenshots to share, with automated features like blurring usernames, selecting depth of parent / child comments to include, merging with post content
• being able to “favourite” a sub without actually subscribing
• hiding posts that you’ve already seen

Ultimately, as with any tool, the best tool is the one you have on you.

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.

Most people don’t have a desktop nowadays, so there’s that. Apps were needed because the website has never been formatted well for phones and tablets.