A new platform like Lemmy needs to establish trust and reliability for a certain time period before it can expect people to give back something. Something that the Sync developer has established already for a decade now.

Assuming that Lemmy continues to flourish well, I will be perfectly happy to donate to Lemmy, in fact I’m quite sure that in the long run I’ll donate a lot more to Lemmy than the one time purchase cost of Sync.

I am not sure but possibly the HTML5 features such as the video tag are sufficient to let the browser offer basic media playback capabilities without requiring JS.