Seeing all Reddit apps shut down, I can't help but wonder — what is it that made everyone play by the rules? What happened to the adversarial interoperability spirit? What forces people to use their own API keys instead of pretending to be one of the official apps?
I can understand the iOS apps, the App Store hegemony does kinda force this and there were cases of Apple removing apps that interact with an online service without that service's permission. But web, desktop and Android apps have no one to force them to comply with these kinds of rules, yet these are also shutting down.
It wasn't always like this. 15 years ago, when ICQ was huge, everything with a screen, keyboard, a network interface, and a way to run arbitrary code had an unofficial ICQ client for it. Most people haven't ever seen the official clients. That's just one example. What happened?
Why waste energy building tools to support a company that actively hostile to their own users. Might as well spend the energy building for something else, e.g. to support fediverse, which in the last few weeks got a surge of new apps and tools made by developers abandoning reddit.
I'm just using it for sports news, and it's been great for that (i.e. "wojbombs" for breaking NBA trade news). It's also a great place to get fanarts (anime, gacha games, etc). I don't engage though, only passively use it.
Well, I myself am building fediverse things since 2019, so... :)
The thing with centralized social services though is that network effects exist. You can't just switch from Reddit to Lemmy or Kbin the same way you can switch between Windows and Linux.
At the time I still had the habit to never use my real name, email or address. (Well I was still going to school/studying anyway) I think the assumption was that services were simply there for the creator's benefit. Maybe it's good to remind oneself that a service that is given for free always has a catch unless it's from a non-profit.
> Seeing all Reddit apps shut down, I can't help but wonder — what is it that made everyone play by the rules? What happened to the adversarial interoperability spirit? What forces people to use their own API keys instead of pretending to be one of the official apps?
The official reddit app uses a seperate, undocumented graphql based api rather than the public REST one they allow for public use. I suspect someone is/will be already using it to emulate the 'old' API soon enough.
Imagine you use an unauthorised client and you post a lot of thoughtful content. Really pouring your heart and soul into that account. And then one day a few months from now, boom u/spez (CEO of Reddit) has another genius business insight for the direction he wants to take Reddit. Next day they’ve banned the accounts of everyone who’s been found to be using unauthorised clients.
Better to stay logged out if you’re gonna browse with an unauthorised client.
Besides, the client could keep a list of subreddits you like anyway, and retrieve posts from those instead of from the default front page.
Worst reddit can do then is to IP ban you bat at least they won’t be deleting anything that you’ve been spending time to write.
There didn't use to be any rules to play by. Official "front door" APIs are a modern phenomenon. They started being offered, and rugpulls were rare, so we got complacent and started using them rather than reverse engineering first-party APIs.
We didn't "get complacent", APIs are just a better experience. You get documentation, guarantees of stability, advance warning for changes, a changelog, etc.
Even factoring in the risk of a rug pull, it makes more sense to use an API than spend ongoing constant effort reversing a first-party one that will keep breaking on your users randomly and need urgent fixes all the time.
In the one non-open-source company I worked at, the first-party API was an extension of the public API. Some methods took additional internal-only parameters if you were using one of the official app IDs, for example. Some returned additional fields in responses. A bunch of additional internal-only methods also became available.
I mean, if you have a public API, it makes sense, engineering-wise, to build your internal API on top of that, doesn't it? But apparently not everyone does it like this.
That's basically how reddit works. I've implied this in comments on reddit[1], but there is basically no way for reddit to do what it wants to do with non-OAuth clients.
Old reddit for example uses the reddit API essentially directly. now with new reddit, there's been a split, and it looks like from my count that reddit is currently supporting like 7 different APIs internally, parts of them all used in various different places. The reddit API is pretty functional and most of what anyone would ever really want to do was already supported in the API (and therefore available basically with few current restrictions).
Few of the actual undocumented/internal APIs on reddit are all that interesting.
It's a bit more nuanced than that. Breaking changes are a lot harder once you have third-party clients, and redesigns are even harder.
So, for example, if those clients have only a fraction of the features of your internal clients, it may make sense to relegate them to a separate, stable backend service while you work on your internal one. But if there's just a couple of internal methods and everything else has to be public, it probably makes sense to have a single backend.
There's a lot of in-between cases, and that's where an engineering architect shows his skills in choosing the right approach.
Not an expert, but I wonder if all the redditors who would be mad about it have already jumped ship and gone to federated alternatives, and all the redditors who are left are the ones who don't care and are watching the chaos with popcorn.
If you're asking about the moderators, they were forced to either reopen or be un-modded. They did what they could.
There's a bit of conflating terms but the underlying point makes sense: topics shouldn't be linked with an instance, they should reach across different servers. This is what groups are for, and are being actively worked on.
Usenet? The more I think about it, Reddit is just Usenet with better moderation and voting. The voting doesn't make that much sense in the smaller sub-reddits where you'd typically read all the posts anyway. So that basically just leaves you with building better moderation. Still a hard problem, but not impossible.
If we had spent the time building better NNTP clients, rather than trying to integrate with the API of single company, I think we could have had the possibility at least of having true communities.
NNTP was a bit of a dumpster fire though. Each ISP carrying some groups, or none at all, losing messages left and right ... Those problems cannot be solved with a better client, they were fundamental issues.
Now, if you had said "if we had spent the time building a better NNTP protocol and servers", I would have agreed. In the end, that's basically what the fediverse is.
The fediverse might be technically better, but it's a big mess. Is it PubSub, is it Mastodon, Lemmy, Podcasting 2.0? We're trying to put way to many project and ideas into "The Fediverse" to provide a clear trajectory.
I feel like it would have been easier to fix NNTP. It had at least a clear focus.
Same, I mostly came to HN through search results or links out of Reddit. Once Apollo shut down I pretty much was done - I only ever used Alien Blue and when it got bought, I was off Reddit until Apollo came along.
HN is where I’ll be for my daily news stuff, and I’m actively looking for communities and forums around my more niche interests and hobbies.
If that's you idea of a Reddit replacement, then you've been using Reddit very different from most people.
The issue with replacing Reddit is that you need millions of users to crowd-source all that information that has gone into every minor sub-reddit. I don't think it's sub-reddits like /r/askreddit, /r/pics or /r/politics that people would be missing in a Reddit clone. It's all the small specialized sub-reddit, where you could get help fixing a lawnmower or debate the finer points of the various aspect ratios of national flags.
I wouldn't say it's a replacement, rather it's a new experience focused on what I believe is a shortcoming with current social media sites in that they aren't optimized for live discussion.
For instance you mention "debate the finer points of various aspect ratios". Current social networks are not very good for actual debate, in fact the genesis of Sqwok can be traced to a live debate in r/worldnews where I grew tired of refreshing the page. Many of the alternatives popping up for both Twitter & Reddit are cloning the underlying data model and user interface without offering much more.
Sqwok is different in that it couples some of the familiar aspects of existing social networking with high quality instant messaging, designed from the ground up for live public debate and discussion in a new format. Still has a long way to go but I believe there's a place for it.
> The issue with replacing Reddit is that you need millions of users to crowd-source all that information
Reddit didn't start out with subreddits or millions of people, it was just a fun place to read the news.
Your broad statement is ridiculous. I am not friends with 3 billions of people, but many people I care about are on the fediverse; everyone (within the margin of error) is on the fediverse. No one (within the margin of error) cares about a tech forum hosted by a VC (from https://whaly.io/posts/hacker-news-2021-retrospective). And yet here we are.
Please don't use only your tech and stats goggles to analyze the situation, understand that we are talking about people with a vast range of experiences and wants and needs.
The only real pain with Lemmy right now is that it doesn't have all the niche sub Reddits due to lower population. Hopefully that'll change, because that's Reddit's real draw for me, not just shitposting and memes, which Lemmy is now doing a decent job with.
Yes but there's definitely some kind of "fair use" allowed for trademarks. My own observations show that it's fine for a product to claim it's "for" or "compatible with" someone else's trademarked product. One example is third-party coffee capsules "for Nespresso machines", usually accompanied by "not affiliated with Nespresso". I'm sure Nespresso has an army of lawyers but these things continue to be sold all around the world so it must be legal to do this.
In that specific case, it's because Nespresso's patent on the capsule design ran out and they can't stop other people from selling compatible capsules anymore. While they still had the patent, they went after third-party capsules pretty aggressively. There is no "fair use" clause for patents or trademarks the way there is for copyright, but patents expire much faster. (Trademarks do, too, although they can be renewed indefinitely -- but you have to do it affirmatively every 10 years in the US.)
With the necessary "not a lawyer" disclaimer in place: in the case of Reddit's APIs (or anyone else's), AFAIK the issue wouldn't a trademark or patent issue, per se -- an API can't be patented (or trademarked), and it's debatable whether they can be copyrighted. (A case between Oracle and Google involving Java's APIs made it all the way to the Supreme Court, which kind of punted on making a definitive legal decision as to the copyrightability of APIs.) But, making unauthorized use of them could almost certainly be classified as a breach of contract, e.g., a violation of the end-user license.
This happened to my preferred reddit app: reddit is fun. They changed their name to "rif is fun for reddit". Still want reddit in the name to show up in searches.
I thought this as well. I'm apparently a weirdo because I've just used the website for the past 14 years, on both desktop and mobile (though with an ad-blocker), but for all the folks that really love the alternative Android apps, why can't bring-your-own-key be an option?
The fact that they're installing an alternative app kinda makes them super-users of Reddit anyway, so asking them to generate their own personal API key shouldn't be too unreasonable.
It just seems strange that the app would choose to completely shut down instead.
Christian (Apollo dev) said that he has asked reddit specifically about letting people use their own API keys in Apollo and reddit said that they wouldn't allow it.
It would lead to a cat and mouse game and Christian is not interested in that. Why should he bend over backwards to improve user experience of a platform that is working actively against him?
Because the reality is that reddit doesn't want third-party apps, and wouldn't allow it. Why do you think this is a technical issue? Reddit doesn't want the apps, period.
Me too, I intercepted the network requests and rewrote the key and token (and user agent ^.^ I wonder if any reddit admins here would recognize it...) in the request to access_token, or whatever the endpoint is idr
Assuming you are on android since you patched the app. Did you manage to do it without data loss? It's annoying to turn on httpcanary every time I launch rif.
from my own personal experience, reddit's legal team sends you a threatening email demanding that you take down your site stating that you have violated some tos/agreement
>> It wasn't always like this. 15 years ago, when ICQ was huge, everything with a screen, keyboard, a network interface, and a way to run arbitrary code had an unofficial ICQ client for it. Most people haven't ever seen the official clients. That's just one example. What happened?
Crony capitalism and big tech monopoly is what happened. These companies achieved success by doing innovations once but today they no longer want to work the hard route of innovating things. Instead, they're using the "legal" and convoluted route that involves closing the source code or build processes of everything, acquiring the small competitor who tries innovation and shut it down, encouraging walled gardens and non-standard APIs everywhere, etc.
That's part of what happened, but I think the reason that crony capitalism happened in the first place was the demographics changed. Companies don't "want" do to anything but exploit something to make a profit.
When ICQ was huge, it wasn't your average joe sixpack using the internet. Now that it is, there's a lot of money to be made.
That's in the US though. It's known that the US government does its best to protect the interests of corporations. There are other countries, in some of which reverse engineering something for the purpose of interoperability is explicitly allowed.
edit: looking at the list of cases, and knowing that the US legal system relies on precedents, it feels like using an online service's private API is allowed under this act.
Yes, as far as I can tell terms of service violations resulting from things like scraping/using unofficial APIs are not CFAA violations and certainly not criminal unless you are not supposed to have access to the data in the first place. The company may still sue in civil court but it has to be on other grounds. Which is why hiQ "lost" to LinkedIn and settled even though they won on the CFAA issue. And why Plaid is still in business.
The important thing is that it was suggested to use API keys which you are not authorized to use. Just because the keys are technically public it doesn't mean that you are authorized to use them.
If someone uploads their AWS token to Github it isn't legal to use it even if it was made public.
> If someone uploads their AWS token to Github it isn't legal to use it even if it was made public.
I'm pretty sure these kinds of services where you can incur significant charges by using the API have a stipulation in their ToS that any API calls performed with your key are considered to be made on your behalf. Kinda like banks do with online banking, "everything done online under your login is considered as if you've done it at a branch with paper forms". Regardless of laws it's still your own responsibility to protect your credentials.
They tried to shut down youtube-dl on copyright grounds because iirc the unit tests included URLs for some music videos and breaking their "DRM" constituted a DMCA violation or something like that. That was the only attempt I'm aware of.
Reddit resents its users. We’ve been unpaid moderation staff for the life of the website and admins don’t give us the tools we need to do a good job for free. Good riddance.
ICQ was the messaging service everyone around me used in the late 00s. The two most popular clients were QIP and Miranda. Then VKontakte introduced instant messaging and ICQ was quickly forgotten. Then, around 5 years later, people started gradually switching to Telegram. Today almost everyone I chat with uses Telegram.
The network effects were very localized, depending on which country you were you would have probably used a different service. ICQ faded out pretty quickly around 2002 where I lived, with MSN, Yahoo, and Google, taking over. I know in the States they also had a lot of AOL and iChat.
Indeed, for the UK at least, the ICQ peak was 98-99 wasn't it?
MSN messenger quickly took over after it was released in '99.
I remember hearing at the time that ICQ remained popular in Russia and other Eastern European countries for much longer than it did in Western Europe though.
What do you mean by that? An API key usually is the secret. And everything needed to access the API must by definition be contained in the client app, so it's only a question of reverse engineering enough of it to extract these parameters.
I have no idea what cratermoon is intending to talk about, but the usual way to solve this problem is attestation. At a high level, the client device has the secret, but it is embedded in a secure enclave that makes it difficult to extract. You then build a chain of trust from that secret that attests that the binary being run is the official one.
Android (at least with the standard Google services) seems to provide an implentation of this through the play integrety API [0]. I'm not familiar with the internals of that system, but I have worked on this type of system for a much more constrained use-case.
If I were designing this, my first pass at a napkin design would be:
* Devices running the app must have a TPM. This TPM is loaded with a private key that is intended to remain highly secret. Corresponding public key is well known.
* During boot, "everything" is measured into the TPM's Platform Configuration Registers (PCRs). To measure something into a PCR, you update the PCR value as: PCR[n] = hash(PCR[n] || measured_value).
* The TPM does not (in this use-case) have a notion of what the "correct" values of the PCRs are. However, it can use the secret key to sign the PCRs values. Forging this signature would require either breaking the underlying crypto, hacking the TPM, or learning the secret key contained within the TPM. To prevent replay attacks, the TPM includes a nonce sent by the server.
* The device sends the server a list of what firmware/kernel/OS it is running (everything that was measured into the TPM). The server determines what the PCR values for the claimed configuration should be, and validates the signature that the TPM generated
* You now know that the OS is "trusted", and can now trust the OS to verify that the app is signed by a given public certificate and is running in a sufficiently secure environment.
How does authenticating the user help? The whole point of the exercise is to block 3rd party apps. It is assumed that the user is authorized to access Reddit through the first party app, so authenticating the user doesn't solve the issue.
That's how oauth2 works. If the app isn't registered with reddit, it doesn't get to act on behalf of the user. No app secrets are necessary, just the user's login credentials, which the app never sees. The resource owner (reddit in this case) can allow or disallow based on the client_id (which is not a secret) and the redirect_uri registered for the app. Reddit, twitter, google, github, apple, and dozens of others handle apps this way.
Redirect_uri helps with webapps that run on a standard web browser. However, if the client is not a web app (or, is running under a properly modified web browser), it can simply ignore the redirect.
Oauth2 does contemplate a client_secret field for client authentication. However, such a field is useless on public clients.
The oath2 spec is very explicit that client_id can not be used as a means of authenticating clients.
It is technically impossible to embed a "secret" into something you allow everyone to download, and expect it to stay secret forever. This is called security through obscurity and it isn't real security.
This is in-fact the precise use case of secure enclave remote attestation. Maybe the GCHQ will be able to run their own Reddit clients, but the average person or even experienced hacker will not.
I hope so, but we need a winning instance first. When you search for Lemmy right now you're sent to a page that begins with "Join a Server... Run a Server". That kind of first experience will never replace Reddit.
Lemmy.world seemed to be winning the SEO battles in my Google search. Is that a good one?
Edit: Sorry for changing my entire post; I had incomplete information about Lemmy at the time.
What do we need a "winning" instance for? In a federated world what does that even mean? What is this (online? HN?) cultural obsession with winner-take-all? The whole point of federation is that you don't need winner-take-all which is in fact unhealthy.
If you have a community on Reddit which you want to migrate you just need to find a stable instance with admin policies you consider reasonable. If it's a big community with really active moderators you might even want to start your own instance. If Lemmy needs anything it's probably a managed hosting provider like masto.host that could make it easy for large communities to run their own servers.
Example: Right now you have a bunch of /r/linux lemmy subreddits with their own posts and threads that are independent of each other. You can make a thread on /r/linux on the lemmy.example.com instance and will not appear at /r/linux on lemmy.example.net
This kind of fragmentation is pretty bad in terms of UX.
If I want to read information about linux I need to follow HN, lobste.rs, LWN, and maybe other sites. All of them independent. All of them with different conversations. All of them with different accounts, meaning that many identities.
The fediverse is not like that: with a single account you can subscribe to all discussions, participate anywhere. Fragmentation is only when you don't participate: once in, all discussions appear on your instance, everything is reachable.
> You can make a thread on /r/linux on the lemmy.example.com instance and will not appear at /r/linux on lemmy.example.net
That's not how this works. You control what appears, not the instance.
> Can you, for example, subscribe to /r/linux on “all” Lemmy servers?
Yes, by design. You do have to search for all that exist, but you can follow them all from your own instance, provided your instance and the remote instance allow federation.
> Likewise, can you have a reasonable expectation that others would do the same — so it doesn’t matter which server you post your questions on?
I don't know yet the usages on the Threadiverse, but it is expected that people at least know the multiple communities that exist. The discussion about merging happens constantly, with pros and cons, and no easy decision for anyone
Lemmy needs a better experience for first time users. For instance, one should be forwarded to the front page of a random instance and see r/all type content (and given the ability to sign up).
Why not create it? Everything is open. Lemmy is not a monolithic entity like Reddit. It would be nice if the developers created something like this but it doesn't have to be them.
I thought about creating something like r/all, but you can get something similar on any instance if you filter by posts + All: https://lemmy.sdf.org/?dataType=Post&listingType=All&page=1&... . This will be restricted to whoever that instance federates with of course.
To me, the crux of it is that identities are not portable. AFAIK, I can't take my identity and posts and move them a different instance if the one I chose happens to become evil or bankrupt.
Sure, I could start my own instance, but that's a high bar.
Identities are also much lower stake. You don't have a giant pile of karma to drag around. You'll lose out on your subs and I guess your personal connection to your comments but that's it.
So, you can visit without being prompted to select a server. You can sign up without having to look through servers. And you can share links without logging in.
So I clicked "sign up" and it suggested checking if there might be another instance best suited to my needs, so I followed the proposed link to https://join-lemmy.org/ and got the "join a server"/"run a server" option. After clicking "join a server" and scrolling the list of half added descriptions I just left because it felt like I was supposed to be making a choice about the community I want to join before even checking the damn thing out. Reddit is the opposite, just sign up and explore the subreddits and pick the ones you like. If Lemmy is anything like that, it's not clear at all and my experience turned me away in the exact way the previous poster described. It felt like I had to pick the subreddit first with no idea what was inside. It sucks. It sucks bad and it won't win in its current state.
Exactly my experience and why I haven't signed up for Lemmy. I don't know what the hell any of those communities are and why/how I should pick one particular one as my home base or whatever, and not getting involved at all seemed like the easiest way forward.
I get the sense that there are a lot of competing visions for what Lemmy should be, and I am not interested enough to put myself in the middle of that.
There's probably an opportunity to start a modified instance that avoids all this identity stuff and hides the federation aspect as much as possible to make it look like a seamless unified community. That's something I, and I presume many others who were turned off by their first experience with it, might well join.
Lemmy's sign up works just like reddit. It sounds like you were looking at the actual pop up box where the identical-to-reddit registration happens, but instead of completing it you clicked a link that brought you away.
So the thing you say you wanted, it was literally right there on your screen and you were looking at it.
You can indeed visit "lemmy" in the sense of visit any instance of Lemmy, and also in the sense of visiting whichever one is tops on google, and also in the sense of visiting lemmy.ml, which is the oldest and perhaps most prominent one.
You an also exercise bad faith and construe those as overly literal references to a singular "lemmy," and position yourself as offering a correction wherein you explain what the fediverse is, a correction which depends on that bad faith interpretation, which appears to be your game here.
> That kind of first experience will never replace Reddit.
Good. Let the eternal September remain on Reddit. The rest of us can go back to the roots of what keeps online communities from becoming cesspools like Reddit and Twitter.
Wherever we want. There are options, if you don't let the media sell you the narrative that anything that's isn't as big as Twitter was at its peak is a failure.
The lessons I've taken away are that it's dangerous to get too invested in any one network, and when network effects get too big they do more harm than good.
That sounds good. Could you expand on the available options in the context of getting "back to the roots of what keeps online communities from becoming cesspools?"
That would defeat the purpose. Lemmy is a fediverse application. The whole point is decentralization. A winning instance would concentrate power in the hands of one admin. We don’t want that!
> Lemmy is a fediverse application. The whole point is decentralization.
No, that's just a marketing lie.
The biggest instances have politically-charged "codes of conduct" that other instances are forced to adopt or be defederated. IIRC, some instances even require those rules to be applied transitively, that is, they will defederate from your instance unless you enforce their rules on all instances that you federate with, and so on.
The whole point of Lemmy and Mastodon is political control, while convincing people that it isn't so. I'm honestly astonished to see how many smart folks are falling for their lies; mostly, I suspect, because the Fediverse's political leanings pander to their own biases.
> I'm honestly astonished to see how many smart folks are falling for their lies
What exactly are the lies? No one group is in control, each fiefdom is free to do what they wish, including not consorting with those they feel are of ill repute or temperament.
As far as being "politically charged", that's just the way the world (well, ok the US at least) is now. Blame the culture warriors who can only think in terms of how something fits or does not fit into their world view, and seek generally only to pander to their base.
> No one group is in control, each fiefdom is free to do what they wish
That's not true in practice. The purpose of a social network is to communicate with others. Network effects ensure that the biggest instances grow ever bigger, and thus not federating with them effectively means not participating in the network. If those instances then impose their rules on other instances under threat of defederation, and further demand that other instances do the same, again under threat of defederation, the "free" network turns into a monoculture that is effectively controlled by whoever runs the most influential instances.
Claiming that you are still free to do as you wish under these circumstances is like claiming that you are free to do as you wish on the Internet, as long as you don't connect to any other computers.
Imagine if email, a truly federated system, worked that way. It would be utterly useless. "Sorry, you can't send mail to user@example.com, because example.com does not require other domains that send mail to it to abide by our code of conduct."
> Imagine if email, a truly federated system, worked that way.
Maybe news to you, but that's exactly how e-mail works. DKIM, DMARC and all the other anti-SPAM measures amount to exactly that. If your server is not proven to abide by the "code of conduct" of not spamming people, your emails get nowhere.
And speaking of fediverse and "network effects", you might not realize but besides the westernized section of the fediverse, Asia has a large community which is mostly defederated on mainstream instances because of what people consider questionable content. They are probably larger in actual numbers.
So federation does work as intended. What you really want, I suspect, is to shove your questionable political opinions down the throats of folk that don't really want to be subjected to them. And somehow being told no, is everybody else's problem and not your own.
> DKIM, DMARC and all the other anti-SPAM measures amount to exactly that.
Nonsense. Anti-spam systems block spam, not content an unaccountable cabal deems politically undesirable. That comparison is laughable.
> So federation does work as intended.
If the intention is to split the world into silos, each of them populated by a different group of moral absolutists, all of which consider all other groups so abhorrent that severing all communication with them is the only acceptable course of action, then yes.
Perhaps that is indeed the intention. Perhaps the prevailing attitude of our time is that this is the only way. However, I'm old enough to remember an Internet that didn't work like that.
The business model matters. The answer to the question: how does the platform earn to maintain its work?
If there is an answer and it is explicit (no matter what it is and how much someone likes or dislikes the business model), it is much better than if there is no answer or it is implicit.
Because everything implicit and muddy can be the basis of anything, for example, of hidden but paid propaganda. The injection of ideas is not so annoying at the initial stage, a good nurse gives painless injections. But then the substance will certainly begin to act. A harmless substance may cause a desire for spontaneous purchase and is therefore generally safe. But harmful substances are different ...
Intrusive ads are the lesser of evils. If we think about it well, of course.
I'm not accusing you of this, but this argument sounds like the usual "my set of rules is not politically charged, they are just common sense!", which is always bollocks.
Do you feel that is more true in their comment than the one they were replying to, which characterised the code of conduct as politically charged in the first place without clarifying what they meant by it?
The question in response seemed like open curiosity.
I admit I haven't looked at Lemmy's CoC, but I have looked at Mastodon's CoC, I imagine it's practically the same, and yes, it's politically charged, so I tend to agree.
(When I talk about Mastodon's CoC, I am talking about the CoC of the main federated network; you get defederated from it if you don't share the same set of rules)
That wasn't what I asked. Do you see that you're also equating your personal opinion on the matter with the reality of how politically charged or not something is?
You disagree with it so it's politically charged. You're not even offering a definition of politically charged, just the scare words.
Beyond that, you're not even looking at the relevant document, but making a statement based purely on what you "imagine" it contains.
I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with their code of conduct, but I feel that you're exhibiting the very behaviour you were attempting to call out and portray as "always bollocks" originally.
It's not what you feel is "common sense" (or rather, you imagine that it isn't) so therefore it deserves to be marred as "politically charged."
No hate speech (for example, no "derogatory posts" based on gender) -> politically charged. ///// No posts or comments supporting or promoting QAnon related content or similarly disproven conspiracy theories -> politically charged.
If you want to look at it the other way, if there was a mastodon instance that said "no pro-immigration propaganda" or "no discussions about abortions" then it would be politically charged as well.
Of course if you ask Mastodon's people they will tell you "you can't just promote a conspiracy theory like qanon, that's common sense". The other way, "abortion is murder, you can't discuss how to murder babies, that's common sense". But no, it's not "common sense", it's politics. YOu don't want people to discuss the politics you don't like in your instance. Fair is fair.
Thanks, I appreciate the effort to clarify and to argue with concrete points.
Which Lemmy rules were you looking at? I can't find anything from the project itself except for a code of conduct for contributors.
The mastadon link you shared is applicable to a certain instance but doesn't seem to apply to the wider fediverse. I also don't see them claiming anything as common sense.
Also, question: Would you say free speech absolutism is politically charged?
>Which Lemmy rules were you looking at? I can't find anything from the project itself except for a code of conduct for contributors.
I was talking about the main lemmy instance, https://lemmy.world/ - if you look at the sidebar it says: "Be polite and follow the rules (https://mastodon.world/about)". That's what I linked to, above.
>The mastadon link you shared is applicable to a certain instance but doesn't seem to apply to the wider fediverse.
The main mastodon instance, mastodon.social, will defederate from you if your server has users that break those rules. I admit I haven't found any similar rules in mastodon.world, but I have to imagine it works the same (see below)
https://mastodon.social/about is the main mastodon instance of the fediverse -> click on "Moderated servers" to see the list of blocked servers and the reasons, like "disinformation" or "hate speech", which are politically charged. mastodon.world has chosen not to disclose their list of moderated servers, but given the list of rules, I predict a similar (or even the same) list. Mastodon servers of the main fediverse share a moderated servers blacklist through some mechanism that I don't know much about.
But.. this discussion was not originally about the server blacklist but about whether the set of rules had a political slant or not.
>I also don't see them claiming anything as common sense.
I imagine that someone who doesn't want to admit that those rules are politically charged will claim they are common sense - at least that's the way the argument has been presented to me in the past.
>Would you say free speech absolutism is politically charged?
Allowing everybody to express their political opinions without censorship is the opposite of a politically charged moderation.
> I'm honestly astonished to see how many smart folks are falling for their lies
The smartest people will always fall for the most blatant lies and false ideologies. That's because it's a tantalizing challenge for their intellect, to try their hardest to twist logic and words to fit with the lies. Then they derive evil pleasure for making less sophisticated people believe their lies, or even fall so far down the hole that they start believing the lies themselves. Normal people usually just call bullshit and move on with their lives when some false ideology pops up.
Everything is politically-charged. Everything has a bias. It's a lie to make you think all opinions can happily be exchanged on a forum with everyone.
The fediverse allows you to be connected to whomever you want, and if they're part of an instance whose rules don't agree with you, then those persons also don't agree with you; why should they be subjected to what you want to say ?
Join the fediverse by building your own instance, the more instances the stronger the network. But don't expect everyone to be willing to talk with you, that's not how societies work.
But isn't that the ultimate expression of decentralization? A bunch of instances chose to adopt a code of conduct and you may choose not to do so. Instances may choose to interact with each other or not.
No centralized "political" control.
In essence, every social media platform leads to political echo-chambers in the long run. People build their own social networks consisting of people they know personally or admire, this easily leads to being surrounded with people that share the same political bias as you.
I don't believe that healthy political discourse is even possible on social media in the first place. Especially not if the political posters are anonymous.
The advantage with Fediverse and Lemmy in particular, is the fact that creating multiple accounts on left-wing/right-wing/neutral instances is pretty easy. You can add all your Lemmy accounts to a (web) app like vger.app and voila you can now join every political discussion on Lemmy in an almost seemless experience.
Political control is thus harder in the fediverse than on centralized platforms like reddit or Twitter. But even if the platform managed to discourage political segregation, the people will still look for every possible to segregate themselves.
The general public does not care at all about that. It's the experience alone that matters. Lemmy is confusing and weird to the majority who look into it.
I don't think it would defeat the purpose at all. Even if you have a winner, decentralization ensures there will always be a quick, nearly-equivalent alternative waiting in the wings. And as my sibling poster stated, a winning instance (or a handful of them) is/are necessary for public buy-in.
Maybe I'm a better representation of the more casual user, but I googled Lemmy and saw words like "federation" "decentralized" "start server" which are all concepts that are like 50 IQ points more than I generally assign to my Reddit user experience. I just went back to Reddit.
It seems to be growing organically and linearly if not exponentially. Maybe it couldn't have handled that anyway. I hope it continues to grow for sure. It seems to have a bit more of that old reddit energy, depending on which communities you go to.
This is a particular teddit instance shutting down, not teddit the software project.
Stuff is moving a lot currently and there is a bumpy road ahead, but there are several courses of action already being mapped out (scraping html, r-e the private gql api, a setting for operators to put some auth token, ..).
I get all my value of teddit from a self-hosted instance - I think there remains a lot of value in these types of alternative front-ends even if they’re rate-limited to what a single residential IP would normally be rate limited to and public instances aren’t possible.
> simply because they want to cut costs on their infrastructure to protect their bottom line.
This line doesn't make sense, since it doesn't "cut costs" to make a user use a particular user-agent instead of their preferred browser, nor does it "protect their bottom line".
There's a potential argument that using custom clients that block ads costs Reddit ad revenue, but it wouldn't if using custom clients had been made a perk of, say, Reddit Premium which is already ad-free.
There's an argument that somehow Reddit is "losing out" on third party client subscription revenue, but that's like saying web sites should share revenue from a commercial web browser, or ISPs should share revenue from subscription web sites. Hard to argue for either if one believes in net neutrality.
Some Reddit related apps were fine. Like apps to assist moderators and keep communities healthy, or apps that made it easier to use Reddit.
Some others were more questionable, like the ones that automatically scraped Reddit and archived all posts and comments so that there was always a way to retrieve a deleted post or comment.
Or the ones that scraped Reddit to build datasets for machine learning purposes.
In the end, the golden law of common sense stands: jerks make it hard to have things that are built on an expectation of good faith.
Kind of sad. I used to use libreddit or teddit for my reddit fix but they’re all broken now. Maybe it’s for the better so I can stop using reddit completely. With LLMs, it replaced most of my google and reddit needs anyways.
I disagree. The current title "Teddit Is Shutting Down" implies that the Teddit project or the official Teddit instance at teddit.net are shutting down, neither of which are currently happening.
I am in this boat. Though my phone usage is still there, I'm spending more time on other apps to get the same brain-break, entertainment, or distraction. Reading articles here or following other news sources straight from their sites instead of having a handy subreddit that aggregates them all (example - following Formula1 news).
Reddit has allowed the third-party app system go too far and now they are struggling to contain it.
I remember when Twitter did the same thing, but they realized it early and did it when there were not too many apps that users were used to.
I feel Reddit will come out fine from this. A minor hiccup. Mods will be replaced, apps will be forgotten and users will talk about this whole thing in some AskReddit thread.
The sad fact of the matter is there are no viable alternatives to Reddit for the average redditor.
Are you sure? I've used Reddit for 15 years and it's the first time I don't really have a good way of using it, besides the desktop (on old.reddit).
On mobile (where I used to spend reddit most time) their own app is so crap I don't even have it installed, so I have no easy way to browse. On Chrome I'm not even logged-in, so I only use it whenever a google search leads me there, but I don't post or do anything meaningful.
All in all, it feels like a really stupid move. If you are going to kill the apps, then have a decent alternative. Otherwise, just charge them a profitable but not stupid amount. And if reddit is losing money, maybe just look at their headcount and start there...
- https://wefwef.app/posts/lemmy.world/all - voyager which is almost pixel perfect recreation of apollo (but in a web app that you can just "add to homepage" on ios)
You don't even need that much, at least in lenny.world you can change to a compact (light\dark) theme in your profile that is very close to old reddit.
While you’re correct, it is a not insignificant number of users who were using third party mobile apps. Depending on the subreddit, I saw stats of up to 30% in data uploaded to various channels. Of course, some of these users will convert to the official app, but many, like the user above and myself, will not. It sucks. Time will tell if losing the active minority is worth it.
Not simping for Reddit (surely they don’t need it), but I think you’re over blowing the negatives in this list.
- not sure what you mean by information density. I’m not sure how much denser information could be without making the font smaller
- auto play videos can absolutely be disabled (even on ads)
- video player seems to work fine to me?
- ads are part of their revenue stream. And as far as ads go, they’re not even intrusive or annoying. If ads keep the site going, I’m happy to have them
- swipe to vote would be nice, but Pushing the vote button really isn’t torturous
- I only use the notifications button on the bottom and it’s right there, so not sure what the issue is.
Maybe the app was a lot more terrible when you last used it but I don’t think it’s as bad as you think it is.
> not sure what you mean by information density. I’m not sure how much denser information could be without making the font smaller
The existence of the share and vote buttons under each card and comment means fewer submissions and comments are visible on the screen at any one time.
> auto play videos can absolutely be disabled (even on ads)
Only on the card view. If you tap on a video submission it will auto play.
The rest of your comments are opinions, and while I respect them, I don’t agree. I tested the app before making that reply. Maybe you should accept that different people like different things than you do?
It's so infuriating to use. Impossible to get the context of a comment when you have clicked to it from a notification. The "back" button follows a completely useless, near-random stack of things you have done in the past. And the main navigation is hidden most of the time so you have to hit "back" an arbitrary number of times to even get to the point where you can start doing something. It was designed by a tree stump.
They already have 'come out fine' from the whole fiasco. The majority of users already used new reddit and the official app because they haven't actually used old reddit or the third party apps that were available to begin with, and with few exceptions pretty much every subreddit that went dark was already back and fully open a week or so after the blackout.
Stripping API access was just a giant 'fuck you' and experience downgrade to the small group of savvy users who won't ever use new reddit no matter what roadblocks are put in their way.
> Stripping API access was just a giant 'fuck you' and experience downgrade to the small group of savvy users who won't ever use new reddit no matter what roadblocks are put in their way.
This small group includes the moderators and power users who make most of the content and moderate it.
Reddit might pull it off but we need to wait and see the long run effects. It feels like the structure is intact but it has rotted from the inside.
The posting bots ("The words in your comment are in alphabetical order! I have read 4534654573657 comments and yours is only the 425834061th one in alphabetical order! Isn't that interesting?") are annoying as a wedgie on a hot summer's day but they seem to be the only thing that's still around.
Things that actually improved the Reddit experience, like third party mobile apps, are gone. And so therefore are many users.
Apollo and RIF made modern advertising-infused Reddit usable for the blind, for mods, and for power users. Instead of at least working with popular apps by offering fair fees and reasonable deadlines, Reddit just killed them.
I've seen too many declines, and I'm inclined to think this is the start of Reddit's. They are destroying their community to get to that IPO. But we'll see.
Nah, this isn’t about alternative apps. This is all about LLMs and the massive trove of data Reddit has. I can’t blame them, I’d probably do the same in their shoes.
In one sense, parts of the old internet hasn't died; dwarf fortress forums seem to be still going strong, as are other forums, if you know where to look, while new forums are springing up using different models.
On the other hand, sites like reddit made it so easy to start a community that interesting people who would've built a forum instead hitched their wagon to reddit, like AskHistorians.
i wonder if there's a sneaky arbitrage play here, lurking in the shadows.
most people on reddit (including myself) are there to lurk, not really participating in conversations, but reading content, memes, news articles, etc.
is there room in the new reddit API charging scheme to, say, snapshot all the most popular NN subreddits, including conversations, every 6 hours or so, and cache and serve that read-only snapshot to visitors (in a separate app, web UI, whatever)? maybe even charge $.99 a month or something for the privilege of never having to log into reddit?
Unauthenticated API access from individual users still works. You can use my app https://reddtastic.com (NSFW homepage) to browse any public subreddits. Use the search.
Also related: if you create a private subreddit on your account and mark it as NSFW (ie you are a moderator of a NSFW subreddit), you can view NSFW content through the API.
..which leads to fines from visa/mc/etc, and putting you to "watchlist". And those fines are pretty expensive. Very few companies in CC processing market would like to risk their business for some adult processing. Easier and safer to just drop it completely.
People pretend their purchases are fraud or regret their purchase later so they chargeback more frequently than other services.
>Why can't that just be accounted for in the processor's rates?
Because it's easier as a credit card processor to just drop all of your high risk clients and focus on serving the rest of your customers as best as you can. Of course that leaves a whole in the market for other credit card processors that charge more for allowing higher risk purchasing.
This is about the API, which is no longer free. They are specifically blocking NSFW content from the paid API (and, by extension, from anything that uses it) so that they can charge money for it.
They want advertisers. That’s their business model.
Advertisers don’t want to be associated with that. No dead babies. No watch people die. No horrific injuries. No sex. No weird/freaky/strange/whatever sex.
They want to advertise next to unobjectionable content so they can’t be drawn into stuff or have their reputation tarnished by accident.
This is somewhat tangentially related to this whole reddit api ordeal, but can someone share why they think that official means of accessing content on reddit app?
For example, I’ve been using reddit ios app for a while and it’s fine for me, aside from ads and some weird a/b tests when “sort comments” dropdown changes its location. Just before Apollo shut down, I downloaded it to see why other people swear by it. Well, it’s relatively similar and it didn’t see anything that’d make it so much better than the official app.
I can understand the iOS apps, the App Store hegemony does kinda force this and there were cases of Apple removing apps that interact with an online service without that service's permission. But web, desktop and Android apps have no one to force them to comply with these kinds of rules, yet these are also shutting down.
It wasn't always like this. 15 years ago, when ICQ was huge, everything with a screen, keyboard, a network interface, and a way to run arbitrary code had an unofficial ICQ client for it. Most people haven't ever seen the official clients. That's just one example. What happened?