I'm curious what this does to libreddit and teddit. Teddit has said as of a month ago they'll go to HTML scraping. Libreddit I think is still waiting to see. But then there is the question of why reward that ecosystem by staying in it? Unfortunately (at least for replacing Twitter and Reddit) as we saw with Twitter and Mastodon I don't see a fediverse site gaining dominance over Reddit, mostly due to the fediverse's very nature of decentralization. So it would be nice to have open source alternatives through the above services.
I sympathize with those libreddit and teddit devs, because they've probably spent hundreds of hours building and maintaining those front ends, all to have their work essentially go in the trash at reddit's whims. But you're right, these are the dangers of rewarding that ecosystem, and building things for centralized services.
They learned a lot in the process probably, that is the most important for them after all. But relying on API is risky, so always go HTML scrapping. The frontends are super useful for finding information already there without accessing the actual website. Always use Lemmy here for everything else.
all to have their work essentially go in the trash at reddit’s whims.
Sure the project may die but the knowledge remains. Software is accumulated knowledge. It can always be studied as long as the source code is available.
Yeah, reddit on mobile makes me want to gouge out my eyes then roll through shattered glass.
The only issue I've found with lemmy on mobile is remembering collapsed comments, or not jumping back to the same comment when you accidentally click a link that doesn't open in a new tab.
I was just using it in my mobile browser, the site is remarkably more functional this way than reddit ever was. It was nice enough that I'm not sure whether I'll feel like I actually need an app or not. I'm on iOS , and I've seen a lot of people mentioning Mlem. I'll probably try it out at some point soon just for comparisons sake.
same - can't tell if it's placebo but ever since i read they were going public, i've noticed it just get shittier and shittier. inexcusably wrong to do
I was a transplant from Digg, ages ago. I never liked the cross-sub political undercurrent that always left you getting dogpiled on by idiots for expressing you opinions. I’ve wanted to jump ship for awhile but not a lot of good alternatives existed. Voat essentially became the social media platform for Stormfront. Ruqqus became a low-tier, low-effort meme board with little information discussion. Hopefully this lasts and has some promise to it.
Lemmy is a fediverse software. Different servers running this software can send posts to other servers running the software. For example, lemmygrad.ml and lemmy.ml are on different servers. Lemmy is the reddit-like software these servers run.
Suggestion / request for people leaving Reddit: shred your content before deleting your account. Don't leave it in the platform, otherwise it'll just become more profits for the greedy fucks.
You can mass delete your comments in a safe way through Power Delete.
That sounds a lot like a perverse albeit unintentional incentive to keep users relying on a platform that shouldn't be trusted. Give this a read, as Karl Voit explains it nicer than I can; I'd also like to highlight that any sort of info that you find in Reddit is highly unreliable, due to the excessive local leniency towards certain types of irrationality.
Also note that this is an easy issue to solve, from both sides. People looking for help can always look for it elsewhere; and people willing to help can migrate their content elsewhere.
@lvxferre@mxmvncnt I think post that was one of the things that pushed me to start collecting all of my troubleshooting posts on my website a couple of years ago.
I want to agree, but Reddit is an absolute trove of information and support on all kinds of technical issues. It’s a repository of information and solutions not rivaled by many others. Losing Reddit would legitimately make the internet a less usable, less helpful place. It’s a damn shame, but it’s true.
A trove of information plus noise and misinformation. If you ask any actual question - be it tech help or something else - expect most replies to be from:
users who didn't understand your question on first place, no matter how simple and concisely you phrased it.
users assuming context out of nowhere or disregarding the context that you've provided.
users avoiding to reply to your question because they really, really want to boss you around on unrelated matters.
users who are not informed on the question, do not know the answer for the question, but assume it and voice it as certainty.
users circlejerking or voicing stale jokes based on some trivial detail in your question.
You might get an actual answer in this sea of misinfo and noise, but if you're looking for help there's a good chance that you don't know enough to sort it out. And the exact same deal applies to anyone looking at the others' questions looking for help.
Losing Reddit would legitimately make the internet a less usable, less helpful place. It’s a damn shame, but it’s true.
The truth is that, no matter what you do, you're going to lose it. Reddit is already going this way, no matter if you delete or don't delete your content, and no matter what happens in the alternatives (as this one). Because even misinfo and noise drive engagement up.
When I run into issues and look to Reddit, despite not knowing how to solve my problems, it’s at least 50/50 odds I find my solution and have no issues. To pretend the misinformation discredits the entire platform is folly. May as well toss out stackoverflow and others, their track record isn’t any better in my experience. I have similar odds there at a solution
All forums have problems, and while I don’t agree with reddits business strategy, it’s backlog is unmatched by most resources.
Keep in mind that plenty subreddits have policies against blog posts, even if they aren't monetised. Even then, you're setting up another place where people can reach you out for help, so frankly that's still an amazing idea.
I use Now for Reddit because the interface of the official reddit app sucks, along with way too many ads. Now that reddit is going in this direction, I decided to check Lemmy out.
So far, I like what I see. It's not perfect but it's a good start!
If they get rid of old.reddit I'm out. The new UI is absolute garbage. However, I'm not entirely happy with Lemmy and it's >50% of my screen being useless whitespace. I wish Lemmy had an old Reddit style. This trash design philosophy of whitespace is ridiculous.
If you're viewing this post from the Lemmy webpage (lemmygrad.ml, in your case), you can click on the rainbow-colored Fediverse icon to see how it looks like from their end.
What a fantastic idea. They don't even have to necessarily pivot their apps to actually be Lemmy clients to deliver a massive "fuck you" to Reddit. They collectively have a large install base. Instead of a warning banner saying, "This app will cease functioning on July 1 (or whatever the date is)," they could add, "Check out our new community over on Lemmy [with a link to whichever Lemmy client]." If I were a Reddit app dev, I would 100% be incorporating this threat into my talks with their team about the forthcoming reddit API.
I see entire threads that are populated by replies from Mastodon (and similar services) users. As someone who has been using Lemmy before federation it is nice to see.
Same here! I created an account about a year ago and now I am considering moving over full time. Does anyone have any good sub-lemmys(?) that newcomers should check out?
Yup... reddit only gains from people being forced into using their own app. Apollo and other 3rd party clients don't track data like "time spent looking at X ad".
Awkward question time: as I explore communities here, I seem to be running into a greater than expected amount of CCP propaganda. I then noticed that we have /c/china which just seems to be rife with the stuff. Some of these users are posting at a pace and consistency that might tenuously breach rule 4, but I'm actually much more concerned by the broader community's acceptance of it. I see I'm not the first person to call it out and the tone of replies in that thread crosses the line into accusing the person that raised the issue in the first place, as though the CCP is this totally normal not-at-all-an-authoritarian-regime kind of thing whose propaganda we should platform and legitimatize like any other article.
Bluntly, this feels like a "your bar is now a Nazi bar" situation. Are there solid plans to clean it up?
the admins of lemmy.ml are tankies and encourage this sort of propaganda posting. i'd highly recommend you move instances if this bothers you; sopuli.xyz and beehaw.org are both good instances
Ah. Appreciate the heads-up. Digging further verifies what you're saying.
Gonna have to think about this one: I mean obviously I'm noping right out the door here, but since its admins are also developers of lemmy itself it casts a nasty shade on the whole platform.
I want a choice that's not "What flavor of authoritarianism will you endorse?"
I'm betting that they plan on later announcing that paid subscription reddit accounts get free access to the API, and this absurd api pricing was just a facade to make it seem they're being reasonable
Teddit might be scraping the public site, so it would be okay. But any apps that use the API will have to have the developer pay thousands of dollars to keep API access. Its the first step before closing off the API entirely like twitter did.
Teddit and similar apps actually use the "anonymous" API, so once this API change comes in, those apps are basically dead without rewrites. Some ideas coming up are full page scraping (would require a lot of new coding and new issues like rate limits and etc), RSS scraping (would not be as complete information wise).
Those projects are great, and its sad that its ultimately up to the whims of some evil company to waste the hundreds of hours they spent building those apps.
Yeah, I'm often thankful to people building these frontends, because ultimately a lot of human information is in those corporate silos and accessing them via a frontend is better than directly.
But at the same time, I would never build such a frontend myself, for the reason you mentioned.
All it takes, is a bunch of profiteering dickwad investors, to make your efforts go poof.
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