I did a poll and nearly 30% of the people who voted said they used Sync! It’s stayed around that percent the whole time too!
EDIT: Here is the poll I forgot to put this here like five times lol https://strawpoll.com/wby5A21R1yA
It may have been rock-solid in the last few months since, but back when they were having their version numbering issues, I was a very new lemmy user and didn’t understand what the problem was (not that I should have had to)- the only thing I knew at the time was that other clients that I’d just learned about somehow didn’t have the same finicky version number problems as jerboa. It kind of wrecked my entire new-lemmy-user experience - especially since (as far as I know) Jerboa is kind of the semi-official client for Lemmy - it doesn’t need to have all the bells and whistles baked into more robust 3rd party clients - it just needs to be rock solid and run reliably as its only job, and it failed.
When Jerboa was having their version number problems, all of Lemmy was having version numbering problems! I couldn’t access certain instances because the version number was incompatible with the version number of the instance I am on, Two-Factor broke on a version upgrade, it was a mess. Lemmy wasn’t really ready for the Reddit exodus, and neither was Jerboa.
When Jerboa was having their version number problems, all of Lemmy was having version numbering problems
Well, not really. This was JUST a problem for Jerboa. There were some other 3rd party apps available for Lemmy and they didn’t suffer from the same problems. In fact, it wasn’t even a technical limitation of Jerboa itself… if you had previously installed and configured Jerboa when the instance version and the jerboa version matched, and then upgraded your jerboa app when your instance didn’t upgrade their version, it magically worked. The problem was when you installed Jerboa fresh and tried connecting it to a slightly outdated instance version - or if you wrecked yourself by clearing your jerboa cache/data folder without realizing that it would behave like it was starting fresh and break. The problem was solely in over-aggressive version checking during Jerboa startup…a total rookie mistake.
That’s about the time that half of all Lemmy users suddenly learned about the availability of some competing apps that didn’t have the same problems.
I’m talking about other version numbering issues that all of Lemmy experienced at that same time. While the one you spoke about was Jerboa specific, I experienced the other issues on the web as well as on Sync. As you pointed out, Jerboa is developed in parallel with Lemmy and it seems like these issues were a blind spot for the developers.
