I think now is a great time to remind everyone, like sync’s developer, Lemmy’s developers need to be paid too! The amount of time all the devs put into making lemmy exist, in my opinion, should be worth some of your money. If you can afford it, donating to the people who develop lemmy and/or the people keeping your home instance up will accelerate the incredible growth of lemmy!
Reddit has benefitted from Sync, and other 3rd party apps, way more than Sync has benefitted from Reddit.
It’s less clear cut with Lemmy, which is supposed to evolve an ecosystem of free tools, so it might be that some day Sync will be benefitting from Lemmy more than Lemmy from Sync… but for now, Lemmy is relatively bare bones, like what Reddit used to be 15 years ago, so any 3rd party app with extra features is still a good thing.
Fortunately, Lemmy has no incentive to go closed source, like Reddit did (let’s not forget Reddit used to be open source while it was convenient for them, then it wasn’t).
Genuine question:
Why did reddit benefit from Sync but Lemmy doesn’t? In both cases, it is a third party app (with premium options or ads that support Sync and not the service it is engaging with) that greatly increases utility for “power users”. So that more or less means that it provides “exposure” by encouraging power users to make the content that casual users will come back to the site for.
And there is the argument that that actually could be bad if the product has no viable monetization strategy but user count keeps increasing but… yeah.