Boost for Lemmy

Boost can be considered up to date, that's how dev does it, abandons it for months and then he is back. He did the same with the reddit app. Anyway, I can't recommend Summit enough. It's great, it's open source, the dev is really active.

Man, there's a dearth of apps that match the old reddit apps.

There's sync, boost and eternity that existed as reddit apps, and they're waaay behind, or abandoned.

When it comes to the best lemmy apps, there's some really good ones, but they don't match the visual polish of boost or sync for sure, as you noticed with summit (which is a damn fine app functionally, and keeps improving). Connect, Thunder, and jerboa tend to stay up to date but jerboa is kinda bare bones, and doesn't support piefed. And they all have some degree of problem with image/video formats and/or their internal players not working well with one or another of the most popular hosting services (catbox and redgifs in particular tend to fail hard on one or another.)

I'm riding sync, boost, and eternity until the wheels fall off just because the ability to have a visually coherent double column view in portrait is just too damn important to my enjoyment to give up until I have no other choice. Thunder does a double column layout, but it's visually difficult to use.

Based on wh at I've heard from friends, the new nsfw piefed instance is a horrible experience on every app because of the issue with hosting and formats. I know that my piefed account is less enjoyable as a main scrolling account for that reason, and I've yet to find anything universally better than sync or boost with this lemmy account, or my backup accounts on other instances under this name.

It really makes me wish my brain would work right with coding because things are almost there on several, but I have zero ability to contribute.

If I was to point you to the first to try next, it would be connect, followed by thunder. Interstellar isn't bad, and the piefed support is good. Past that, jerboa is reliable at least.

Edit: I mentioned piefed a lot because interoperability is important for when instances fail or go down. It's as good or better than lemmy under the hood, and a lot of folks go back and forth between the two on various instances.

I switched to Voyager a few months ago. It lack some features that Boost has like being able to block people/communities right from the start page but in exchange it always load high res images in the feed's cards instead of the blurry ones that Boost uses plus it looks way better on large tablets. I keep a copy of Boost and check it when I see an update just in case they fix it but so far no dice.

I paid for boost way back when but it just didn't load anything for me anymore. I've been on voyager ever since. And now I don't even need to pay for anything.

Thanks for all the replies so far! The apps have customization options, so checking them out isn't as simple as just installing and using them all for a few minutes, which is why the feedback is valuable.

I'm still pretty happy with Boost and still use it as a primary app, but I also checked out some options in case it stops being updated. The best ones I found so far were Summit and Interstellar (the latter is more of a general Fediverse client and still a bit rough, though).

I'm trying Blorp at the moment. Support for Piedfed is better than Boost at least. But sliding to go back from a post is wonky. The app seems heavily active at the moment, so let's see how it goes.