I think it’s more of people wanting to stick with the developers and apps that they have used on reddit. Some of which have been using and supporting for almost a decade. It also means more of an endorsement for Lemmy, as some reddit sync users wouldn’t consider Lemmy otherwise. Lastly, a significant number of power users (those that actually post, comment, and otherwise contribute) use third party apps over the official app, meaning that having support for these apps on Lemmy will hopefully bring over quality users and not just a larger quantity users.

That’s my take on it, and I am someone very pro open source.

I def prefer people contribute to the existing open source apps (or make new ones), but overall the more the merrier. I’m happy when anyone builds something for the lemmy ecosystem.

As an extensive user of Sync let me say.

The ability to customize change layout, Twitter previews in posts, ability to open comments, subreddits in windows.

It’s ability to cache comments/threads/videos. So, if android decides to kill Sync due to limited resources I can start where I left instead of having every thing reload from scratch. And lots more. The dynamic Material you theme and the beautiful UI should not be forgotten.

It’s multi windows feature with its caching feature made it indisputable for me. I had anywhere from 3-6 windows or more active to jump back in anytime. If he brings that to lemmy it would make interacting with lemmy that much more awesome. Waiting to see what’s he got in store for us.

Here’s a screenshot to show what I mean by multi windows:

It’s entirely about your UI preferences, really. Most third party apps had feature parity, and the features they didn’t have were more niche. You could find something each of them did especially well, but the vast majority of features an average user could want were present in all of them. Boost was my preference for a more graphical experience, and RIF was my default for its simplicity.

Sync has an extremely vocal fanclub because its dev is very involved with the userbase directly, but it’s really not much different from the other graphical ones save for its MaterialYou integration, if that’s something you care about. It’s as respectable an app as the others.

If they had longer than 10 days to live I’d suggest trying each one to see which fits your preference…but…

Sync for Reddit is a popular reddit 3rd party app. Since Reddit is gonna kill them, the developer decided to do Sync for Lemmy instead, but is gonna take him 3 to 4 weeks to get some kind of beta.

Sync for Reddit is a very popular Reddit client. This is the Lemmy version.

I really hope Infinity will get here, too.