Side downloading .apk files from something other than the Google Play store is shady as hell. It’s way too easy to sneak malicious code into the app that way. Even if the project is open source, I don’t have the time or the skillset to review the code to confirm it’s not malicious. No offense to the developers, but there’s no chance in hell I’m doing that for an upstart app I knew nothing about a month ago.

As a result, I’m using Lemmy via Firefox’s mobile browser right now, with Jerboa completely useless crashing the second I open it.

Hopefully they fix it soon (i.e., within the next 24 hours). First impressions matter a ton. For the masses migrating tomorrow once RIF and others shut down, Lemmy and the different apps for it will appear to be dead on arrival. If we expect any actual content on Lemmy beyond complaints about Reddit and questions about Lemmy, we need those people to migrate over.

The idea that different fediverse instances can all be on different incompatible versions is mind bogglingly dumb. The federation/decentralization design choice overcomplicates things to a huge degree. There are far more downsides than upsides to this approach. I want to like Lemmy/Jerboa, but at this point, the official Reddit app is looking more and more appealing.