I’ve only been on lemmy for like a month, so I have no point of comparison here. It doesn’t feel janky to me, but then I’m not a power user. It works well for what I like to do, which is view posts and comment. Images display well, I haven’t noticed any problems with video. I haven’t tried embedding images in comments yet, let’s try it with a photograph of the richest man in Indiana:

Give Thunder a second shot, or don’t. I’m not your boss, I’m just some drunk guy on the Internet.

earlier than initially projected

There’s that phrase again. If only someone had warned us loudly and repeatedly.

Have you tried Thunder? I’ve been using it since I finally got around to moving over here (admittedly not very long) and I’ve found that Thunder gets a lot right. It’s open source, ad-free, cross-platform, and nice to use. It doesn’t have quite as much polish as Relay but the design language is similar enough that it doesn’t feel like a huge departure.