Same. The official app was so clunky and always crashing. I saw a recommendation for rif and never looked back. Without rif, I wouldn't have even bothered to sign up for reddit.
I logged back into rif on Wednesday for the first and last time since the boycott, to say goodbye to my friends in a private sub and put a "screw you spez" message as my flair on the biggest public sub I post in. Unfortunately I was the only one in the private sub not willing to put up with spez's crap, so they won't be recreating it on another platform. Thank you, spez, for taking that away from me.
Just from the look of it, Thunder seemed very RIF-like. Last I saw TalkLittle was making an app for Tildes, no indication that he's working on a Lemmy app sadly.
I have Jerboa, Liftoff, and Thunder installed. They all have different bugs or issues...what bothers me a lot currently is not being able to hold on an image and do copy image for instant paste, without download -_-
It is also not easy to open the current post/comment/whatever in a browser.
After so many years, the way RIF works is just second nature.
"our community continues to thrive" even though we'll have nothing to talk about.
Folks round here do need to understand though that there's really not likely to be all that big an influx of people on the first. Reddit has far, far more inertia than the Lemmy community likes to imagine. This is a great example.
The Relay for Reddit dev (u/dbrady) is bravely working on Relay. I got an update yesterday. The changelog said "further reduce API calls". I think he actually wants to make it a paid app, which I'd gladly pay for.
I hate the Reddit change as much as the next guy, but if the Relay dev can actually make a profit from it that'd be awesome. The app cost a one-time $4 or something, which I'm sure he never made bank with. Having like $3-5/month for it would probably be sustainable.
He wasn't optimistic on being able to make that work, last I heard.
He was initially talking about $3/month, but the issue is that most of the people willing to pay a monthly subscription for Reddit are the heaviest users. So instead of looking at the API usage for the average user, pricing needs to be aimed at the top 10% or 1% of users.
I'm still looking into it, gathering data etc. Unfortunately the average call rates when broken down to the top 2, 5, 10% etc of users is painting a much different picture. This is the cohort of users I would expect to possibly convert to a subscription model and the average rates for those users can be 3,4,5 even 600 hundred calls per day just by the shear amount they use the app. Some of the top users are well over 1000 per day and sometimes over 2000.
So I'm not sure yet. It would probably have to be a usage based subscription model if it was going to be anything and I'm not sure that's worth doing. I am still looking into it but unfortunately I don't think my earlier price points will work.
Very sad, I used this app daily for over 10 years. I didn't even had the premium version, I also never logged in, I just lurked there for countless days. It may not be the prettiest app, but it works just perfect. Does someone know how I can buy the developers a few coffees? They deserve it.