Out of the loop

This is a good summary; as a reddit exile myself who exclusively used Sync, I think it's worth emphasising that Dawson has done an amazing job of making the transition from reddit to lemmy pretty seamless from an app design point of view. I can set my views and filters up identically as they were in the Reddit version of the app, and the lemmy experience becomes essentially identical to reddit.

There's definitely a conflict between "paid closed source app" and "FOSS fediverse", and there's arguments to be made about whether user revenue should be directed to server expenses to maintain communities or front end app development to attract more users, which I think will be interesting to see play out. But at the end of the day Sync makes lemmy "useable" in a way that replicates the reddit experience, which is what a lot of migrants were after - other apps (while arguably more feature rich in terms of the fediverse) just didn't quite hit the dopamine-feed the way Sync does.