Personally, tap to scroll to top is a must have feature for me in an iOS (or Android) client. Don’t see an issue with it being an option to disable, but wouldn’t want to see the feature go entirely and I think it should be on by default for consistency with the OS.

I usually disable the quick jump buttons as I don’t really like the ever presence overlay, and it’s not something that really feels like iOS to me. I actually find those buttons more jntrusive. Given that the jump to tops what I use.

With the size of phones I don’t find myself ever accidentally clicking the region and don’t recall ever accidentally triggering a scroll when I intended to bring up notification or control center.

So yeah, I think having an option isn’t a bad idea, but would want the feature to stay.

I’ve moved to Avalon from Memmy, which itself is a great app and the one that spoke to me most when I made the mid year decision to largely cut my Reddit usage. It’s a great app particularly for free.

That said, we probably can’t talk about Memmy in this context without noting the almost two month absence of any updates for the app, which is only early in its life, due to the developers citing burnout. There’s certainly got to be some questions about sustainability for those guys when they have to also carry jobs etc and Memmy for all intents is a hobby for them.

Now maybe the apps in a place where you feel going a few months without updates doesn’t matter, that’s fine. At the same time it’s possible that a revenue stream of some sort would allow the devs to prioritise work on the app over other things. I don’t imagine Lemmy yet has the user base to sustain a developer full time on the single app alone, but having some income from the app may none the less assist greatly. People have even asked the Memmy team to consider adding paid tiers in recognition of some of the issues.

None of that is to say that I didn’t do a double take when I saw the price of Avalon, and did give it a second thought. It’s a decent price commitment, I agree. Apps that are paid for could also be abandoned too which is a risk. At the same time I have noticed a number of the Lemmy apps have had growing pains, burnout issues for devs etc, so while there are good free options out there in the longer term in many cases that may not be sustainable, and there is a place for paid apps particularly where that can contribute to the apps ongoing development.

Monthly $2.99, Annual $22.99 and Lifetime 49.99. This is in $AUD.

Unsure what that comes to exactly in USD but I assume it’s around $1.99 and $14.99 or there abouts. Other posts note lifetime is $30USD.

Prices are there in the TestFlight version. Assume the same error preventing purchases is preventing those being displayed as they probably pull the price dynamically from the App Store.

Of the three, probably B.

I much prefer the current icon but to all three as the colour really pops on that one. I was very pleasantly surprised when that icon popped up on my device.

The Mastodon developers and operators of mastodon.social seem pretty supportive based on what information they have so far, based on their blog post.

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-threads/

The tone from that so far is that federation would be in the cards for them, assuming Meta implements ActivityPub properly.

My position differs currently for Mastodon and Lemmy.

In the case of Lemmy, I’m not yet 100% sure. Lemmy’s strength may also prove to be a weakness I feel in terms of it replacing Reddit, in that the decentralised nature naturally creates a dispersion of the audience. While anyone on Reddit could create a community, having them in one place really funnelled people into logically named communities. On the other hand while subscribing to a number of communities for Lemmy, it’s not that infrequent to come across the same or similar community on multiple instances and then needing to work out where you want to go. On one hand it’s probably good to have the varying perspectives and culture this will bring, but I think it’ll also make it hard for users looking for that definitive place to go. It’s very much early days though and perhaps many of those communities will naturally assemble in mass on various instances once the dust settles.

We’ll see how that plays out I guess, and right now my Reddit use is at maybe 10-20% what it was and I’m really looking to invest my time here. I think with time that both Lemmy updates an 3rd party clients will make working across instances more transparent and in turn broaden appeal.

I’m more bullish for Mastodon in the short term. The reason for that is my usage concerns me looking to follow an individual rather than locate a community of individuals. Since people will have one account, there’s less impact caused by decentralisation as my interactions with a person I follow is very much 1:1 (unless for some reason they chose to create and maintain multiple accounts). If I want to follow Apple’s account, they’ll presumably have a single one versus there maybe being 6 viable Apple communities across Lemmy instances. I find my use of Mastodon in terms of user experience is much closer and familiar to Twitter than currently Lemmy is to Reddit. Additionally, once it’s enabled for ActivityPub, I think Meta having Threads throws significant support around that particular ecosystem, and brings it to the masses. Can’t imagine we’ll see a billion dollar company spin up a Reddit alternative that is Activity Pub integrated to give Lemmy that same boost, unfortunately.

To be clear I’m very supportive of both Lemmy and Mastodon and want both to succeed. I do think reddit being centralised has some benefits but, especially for people not looking to invest heavily in browsing across instances, and that it’s to be seen how Lemmy will evolve as it grows and if casual users will be able to sign up and easily find the communities and information they are after. The 1:1 person interaction for Mastodon I think simplifies things and Thread potentially will result in a massive boost for Mastodon. It’s early days for Lemmy and I can’t imagine in Jan or Feb that the majority of us here had even heard of it, let alone considered leaving Reddit. It’ll only continue to grow and I’m excited to watch it do so.

I’ve also had freezing up while scrolling through things, not all that infrequently but often enough to be noticeable. That said it’s a slick app most of the time so I’m curious to see if those performance glitches can be resolved or if it’s an unfortunate byproduct of it being a PWA and the browser being a limitation. Could also be my Lemmy instance being unresponsive, which has been the case at times, but the app not yet handling that gracefully due to being an early release.

Happy to wait and see. When it is flawless, which is most of the time, it’s beyond any web app I can recall using.

I’ve signed up for a bunch of them and still haven’t decided where I want to make my main.

Same story for me, although I keep coming back to Lemmy.world in the first instance, at least for the Lemmy instances (also explored kbin, tildes and squabbles). Mixed feelings about Lemmy.ml as I think there’s virtue being on the instance the devs run as it seems unlikely to go away, although there has been the talks around political views. From the political side, I do hang out more often than not in tech spaces though so I doubt it’d actually impact anything I’d want to engage in discussion about.

Also have an account with Beehaw which was my first but silly as it may seem, the name of that one puts me off a bit. “Lemmy.world” sounds like something I can more easily communicate to a friend verbally, for whatever that is worth.