A big thing to bear in mind is that Reddit has been around since 2005, but has only had an official app since 2016. For context, the first Facebook app came out in 2008, and while Reddit certainly wasn’t that big at the time, it’s still weird that it took so long to actually get an official app out there. More over, Reddit didn’t start from scratch. They bought up the Alien Blue 3rd party app, which was the top dog on iOS at the time, and reworked it into the official Reddit app.
The point here being that, for a very long time, 3rd party apps were the only reasonable way to browse Reddit on mobile. Even after the official app came out, Reddit themselves stated there was no intent for 3rd party apps to go away. For a lot of us, those 3rd party apps simply were Reddit on mobile.
To more directly answer you question though, I used BaconReader for 11 years on Android. BaconReader still to this day has a slew of customization and tweaking options that the official app just doesn’t have. Even simple features, like color coding the left edge of comment blocks, thereby making it much, much easier to keep track of where comment threads diverge. These things also weren’t limited to BaconReader, as most 3rd party apps came to the same conclusions: there’s pretty simple ways to improve the Reddit experience by just offering a few extra options and thinking a bit about how people use the site.
BaconReader was light, fast, barely used any data, and just worked really well. By contrast, the official app just… doesn’t feel all that well put together. The basic usability options everyone else figured out years ago aren’t present, the app is more than double the size of what BaconReader was, it positively guzzles data, and while there’s lots of updates and feature adds, none of them do much to actually enhance the experience of… you know, browsing and interacting on Reddit. For me, the official app really isn’t any better than just using a web browser on my phone, and that certainly uses less data and is less fussy, so that’s what I use now. Certainly cuts down on just endless scrolling though.
Stuff like the user guides took time in reddit. Besides that though, Lemmy isn’t really ready for mainstream yet. They are performance issues and significant features missing. Things will get better eventually though and it will become more mainstream over time.
I wish more people appreciated the adventure of it all. It's not like most of the content is absolutely necessary for our daily functioning. Whether I spend an hour learning about the fediverse or looking at a stream of "rule" posts, my life won't be diminished.
PSA regarding federation (copied from previous comment)
I also want to continue spreading the word about federation issues. I've been on Lemmy for a month now and it's going great. But that whole time, it's essentially been impossible to comment on kbin magazines. The comments simply don't show up. I'm not seeing most of your comments when browsing here from Lemmy, but I am seeing Lemmy comments.
I obviously have this account, but its annoying to keep switching between accounts, plus I haven't really gotten the hang of the kbin interface yet.
Point being, I suspect much of the sluggishness of organic growth is not due to a small userbase, but rather due to the fact nobody can actually find the threads and comment on them efficiently. We need to remain steadfast and trust that the developers will fix this stuff up soon. I really feel that simply making Lemmy and kbin federate perfectly would immediately make this platform 10 times more active. We have plenty of people but right now we are fragmented into parallel communities. This isn't even getting into the server overload at a number of Lemmy instances.
I just don't want people to write off the platform before we can see how it's actually meant to work. I've seen a ton of brilliant comments on kbin and I haven't even had the chance to really mix it up with you guys yet.
Here was the Lemmy post about this story that somebody actually posted here a couple days before this thread. But it doesn't show up here and none of you can see it.
I really don't want people to get discouraged by this bug because it's very disconcerting when you make a high value comment or post and the response is crickets. Its not because the platform is empty, it's because federation is fucked and your post is invisible to everyone not on your local server.
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This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.