The reason for the Reddit protests could have been justified, but the CEO’s response couldn’t.
He messed up, doubled down, and then continued to mess up. I don’t know why the rest of the team let him keep talking
It was lying about the Apollo developer for me. He lied, he got caught, and then said (paraphrasing), “wow, he’s a terrible person for recording our conversation without my knowledge! I don’t want to work with him anymore anyway!”
The nature of bad faith is that there is no right answer.
Yeah, same. I miss it, but he can get fucked with an anchor
That’s what sold it for me.
I don’t mind if reddit wants to make some money on their API, but giving app developers barely a month to respond, having insanely high prices, throwing away the relationships they built with app devs, and not responding to community feedback around the issue at all was all too much.
It was the AMA that was the last straw for me, on top of everything before. It had been going downhill, but that was where I lost all hope it would improve.
That is capitalism man 🤷🏽♂️. The CEO is emperor.
Truth. Lemmy by design resists the influence of capital by being federated.
What if Reddit and the government paid billions to the creators to fork over the servers and to make the source code and apps proprietary?
Unlikely considering their source of funding comes from various European governments.
Also, it’s not very easy to make open source closed source. The original Lemmy code and documentation is already out there. The only thing they could do would be to add new features that are all closed source. (This is what reddit does, as their old code is open source.) At best, it would be a fork of Lemmy with closed source elements.
It’s been established that you can’t call backsies on open sourcing your software.
They could make new updates to lemmy proprietary, but what’s out there is already out there.
They could make new updates to lemmy proprietary
Maybe not even that. Lemmy is released under the AGPL3. This means that modified versions of Lemmy have to also be released as free software under the AGPL3 or a compatible license. To release a derivative work under an incompatible license you would need to own the code or be given permission by each contributor to do so. For any contribution where you can’t make a deal with the author, you would have to rip it out of the codebase entirely. Note that this is true for lemmy devs as well. If there is no Contributor License Agreement that states otherwise, they cannot distribute the work of other contributors under an AGPL3-incompatible license.
Right, I was thinking the “collective authors”; and to be fair, a small contribution could be replaced if tracked properly. If there’s no CLA and there are a lot of significant contributions by various individuals you’re absolutely right that it becomes impractical to the point that it wouldn’t happen.
Reddit was killed, no, murdered.
What do you mean? 😂
Probably that all the things that made reddit “good” were killed for the sake of profit.
That, and fir me at least the places I used to read on reddit are gone. They might have been opened up, but they no longer contain content, or contain little interesting content.
Reddit killing 3rd party apps
A link on Reddit.
It was immediately after spez’s fatuous AMA. I wasn’t specifically planning to leave Reddit, but I had never really been satisfied there, so I was open to the idea. And I ran across a link to join-lemmy.org, so I followed it, just to see what it was about. I had no idea then that following that link would end up being the last thing I did on Reddit, but that’s the way it worked out.
Reddit threatening to ban /r/piracy made me setup a failover in raddle. Raddle restricting sign-ups for months made me switch the failover to lemmy.ml. Reddit protests made me setup lemmy.dbzer0.com and make it the primary location for /c/piracy
I was kinda curious why Raddle wasn’t your first go-to. This explains it.
Removed by mod
+1 for the third party Reddit app ban.
Reddit forcing me to use their shitty app
Dude, it’s so bad. The hordes of people defending reddit, saying, “the official app isn’t even bad! Stop complaining! You’re just too autistic to learn something new!” we’re either liars or have no idea what a good app looks like. The official reddit app has tons of ads that are designed to look like regular posts. It’s so stuttery. It constantly loses your place. You can’t change the home page sort. Read posts get demoted, so after it refreshes on its own without your permission, you can’t find your read posts again.
It’s by far one of the worst apps I have ever used. How it has even been released is beyond me.
Bots. Many pro-reddit pro-official-app comments were proven to be bots during the height of the protests.
Reddit literally has a long, long history of using bots to make the site seem like it has more engagement, even from the early days of the site.
source?
I used the official for about idk most of my Reddit time (which was only 2 or 3 years) and Apollo for 11 months and would’ve been a year but yeah :(
Anyways I didn’t realize how much I disliked the layout of the official app until I switched to Apollo
Which app do you use for Lemmy?
I’m personally using Voyager and so happy with it so far
I like voyager a lot, too. Definitely bridges the gap for me from RIF
I like Voyager, I just wished that I could see my avatar or other people’s avatar
I completely forgot about avatars lol
I like Voyager, I just wished that I could see my avatar or other people’s avatar
Right now I’m on Jerboa. I tried Liftoff for a while but it had some weird bugs, and development on it seems to have slowed down a bit in the last few months. Thought it was very promising however, might try it again in the future.
memmy, voyager didnt stick with me that much
omg I am the exact inverse! Voyager, because Memmy kept failing me.
Mostly Jerboa nowadays and Sync nowadays. I used to use Voyager and Connect and Liftoff, which are all good also in their own ways, but Jerboa and Sync seemed to have the best functionality for me in terms of interacting with different communities and instances across the fediverse. I also need to look into Thunder one of these days.
Many things, but ultimately Spez
Yup. I didn’t even use third party apps, I paid for Reddit premium, etc. I was exactly what they wanted as a customer. However, the way they treated the community beyond the actual decisions they made was unacceptable.
I’d been wanting a mastodon like Reddit for a while anyways, so when lemmy reached a critical mass, I signed up.
What’s your instance like? I’ve never seen that one before.
It’s just a friends and family instance (plus some bot development) 🙂 No real content hosted here. I spun it up after the lemmy.world instability.
Oh nice. Federation is so cool that you can do that kind of thing.
They killed BaconReader
Same, but Apollo. I’m still grumpy about it.
I came from relay, which is one of the few apps that still work. But it had to become reddits bitch to do so.
No nsfw subs, and soon there will be a monthly subscription fee, with multiple tiers depending on what API call limit you need.
And reddit still doesn’t provide an API for new features like reddit chat, nor the rest, but those I never cared about.
Relay is on life support, I hope the dev realises that this is a stopgap. Reddit hasn’t maintained feature parity between the 3rd party API and their internal one for years, which was fine when it was free, but paid services usually come with support. The reddit API isn’t going to have that. This is just a way for reddit to seem like they want 3rd party apps to still be a thing, while still in reality killing them.
i used tje official Reddit app then switched to fatbird (fatbird still works) also i tried using spyke because the name was similar to Skype but i could sign up
Came from reddit like many others. I had been unhappy with the artificial and corporate-sterile feel of reddit for a while. And second to that, the way subreddits were set up made it rife with powermod agendas and no good alternatives to escape them.
I much prefer the “interconnected islands” of lemmy that reduces the ability of anyone to advertise, astroturf, or have ownership of the whole system. It feels looser and puts more control back in the hands of users, which is refreshing.
Same here. A lot of people (including myself until a week ago) are either oblivious or fooling themselves about what is happening to Reddit. Changes are being made with the sole purpose of boosting revenue ahead of their IPO. Reddit is no longer focused on improving the user experience, but has switched to full monetization mode. That will only get worse now. It is a slow-moving train wreck.
And, yeah, some Reddit subs are over-moderated and arbitrary. Looking at you /r/boardgames.
It was not easy to figure out Lemmy at first, and the sign up process a few months ago was difficult (for me). But now that I’m on board with a good app, Lemmy is just great. It feels like early-days Reddit before enshittification set in.
I had been flip-flopping for a while, but I figured that it was finally time to get off of Digg.
I prefer FOSS stuff.
I mean, technically, the code to reddit is open source.
Can you elaborate on this?
Reddit was originally open source code, they made it closed source in 2017 or something
Interesting, I had no idea. That probably would have been a good time to start developing a FOSS alternative.
https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6xh3xp/reddits_main_code_is_no_longer_opensource/
Here’s a good discussion on it. Here’s a great comment from a deleted account:
“back in 2008, Reddit Inc was a ragtag organization1 and the future of the company was very uncertain. We wanted to make sure the community could keep the site alive should the company go under and making the code available was the logical thing to do”
Translation: We needed you guys back then. We don’t now.
The rest of it seems like a combination of technical hurdles that don’t seem particularly compelling (they don’t need to have secret new feature branches in their public repo) and some that don’t make any sense (how does a move away from a monolithic repo into microservices change anything?) and some that are comical (our shit’s so complicated to deploy and use that you can’t use it anyway)
It’s sad that their development processes have effectively resulted in administrative reasons they can’t do it. I remember them doing shenanigans like using their single-point-of-failure production RabbitMQ server to run the untested April fools thing this year (r/place) and in doing so almost brought everything down. So I’m not surprised that there doesn’t seem to be much maturity in the operations and development processes over there.
To be fair though, the reddit codebase always had a reputation for being such a pain that it wasn’t really useful for much. Thankfully, their more niche open source contributions, while not particularly polished and documented, might end up being more useful than the original reddit repo. I know I’ve been meaning to look into the Websocket one.
No longer being able to access Apollo. Had that been allowed (and no extra fees for using it), I would have kept browsing Reddit. Hell, I wouldn’t have minded some ads in Apollo if that meant keeping it.
But damn using that garbage official app. I tried it once again and it’s garbage. I tried it once before when Alien Blue stopped being viable and didn’t go back when I tried Apollo.
When Reddit killed Apollo I deleted my ten year old account and never went back.
Deleting mine now…
Edit: done
General interest in noncommercial social media. My Lemmy account is two years old, and I’ve been on Mastodon for longer than that. I did start spending a lot more time here once reddit axed 3rd party apps.
