YSK: Lemmy browsing app Boost is tracking your data for profiling and more! Consider using other trackingless Lemmy apps such as Jerboa or Voyager
According to the tracking scanner Exodus (can be found on F-Droid), which keeps an updated database on trackers and runs your installed app against its register, you can track what apps are tracking you and clues of how. Saw that Boost is tracking me and uninstalled it and went straight to Jerboa. Jerboa is pretty similar to good ole' RedditIsFun-app and easy to use, so I am personally recommending it.
Nope, you can't actually do that anymore since there's SSL in the way. I tried anyway, though, just for giggles:
drath@machine:~$ telnet lemm.ee 80
Trying 2606:4700:20::681a:5f3...
Connected to lemm.ee.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET /
<html>
<head><title>400 Bad Request</title></head>
<body>
<center><h1>400 Bad Request</h1></center>
<hr><center>cloudflare</center>
</body>
</html>
Connection closed by foreign host.
Of course I can curl and wget, but that feels against the spirit of hardcore reading the raw data.
I really don't know anything about the technicalities of apps, but you should try http://phtn.app/ on mobile, it's UI is pretty good.
That being said if there was an app for it I would totally prefer that over a webpage in my browser
That's very laggy for me, whereas my lemmy app, voyager, is extremely smooth.
It's building a general purpose UI as a webpage which then has to be interpreted via your browser which then serves the UI up to you. Because this browser has to handle literally whatever is being thrown at it at all times, there is a lot of overhead and extra processes running to make it work correctly.
All of the graphics are equivalent, every line between every element, every button, every image is represented in the same data that the text is, so the phone is interpreting and rendering many times more stuff.
In contrast, a native app takes the bare text & media data and renders it in native controls, so the phone is able take a tiny amount of data and fit it into a template that renders natively on the phone. It's doing orders of magnitude less work.
I use it on desktop, despite some bugs from time to time I really enjoy the experience and slick design !
It's still in early alpha so honestly I am impressed !