I am making a Unofficial Reddit API, which mimics the official one.
Its early days, but I would like to have a discussion here about it since my post was blocked on reddit(of course).
Let me know what you think of the project, if you have any input, let me know.
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I haven’t been on Reddit since the day they killed the apps.
Life has been more peaceful in some ways, and I’m not as stressed out. I stopped watching the news too, which had a similar effect.
I have been, but only on browser, and only for specific subs. I go way less often than I used to, and no longer browse the front page.
I made the mistake of actually making a comment with effort. Got trolled by dozens.
Yeah… won’t miss Reddit
Same here
I understand you miss it. Most of us do too. But Reddit decided they didn’t need us. So just let it die on it’s own. We don’t need it anymore.
We still do sadly.
Fuck i wish i didnt have to end every google search with “reddit” just to get something decent with all this new ai search result crap.
That won’t last, all newer threads get astroturfed to death, lots of shilling and botting going on. Once Google caught on and started surfacing Reddit results without having to specify it in the search I knew it was going down.
And the worst part is that lemmy isn’t great to search due to its federated nature.
It gets really bad when people doesn’t want to even pirate it.
Reddit unfortunately won’t die though.
It’s much much much more likely that Lemmy will die over time.
Why do you think that?
Because Reddit gets an insane amount of use, whereas Lemmy doesn’t?
I like it here, but let’s not pretend that people aren’t still using Reddit. Most people don’t care about regressive policies, they just want to look at stupid memes and chat shit online.
Because reddit still has a huge userbase compared to Lemmy and that brings content, engagement and revenue, they are an institution of the internet at this point. Reddit posts are part of google results while Lemmy does not, when people have a problem they find old reddit threads for help, guides and tech support, not so with Lemmy. I would say 95% of reddit userbase doesn’t even know that Lemmy exists. One fuck up will not kill reddit as it currently is, they are too massive, one fuck up might kill Lemmy, if it just doesn’t slowly waste away. Reddit would have to fuck up constantly over a long period of time, kill communities, put features behind paywall, get caught in spying of the users, etc. And each time Lemmy would have to be advertizing itself in every twist and turn to get those users and not alienate them and be able to support the growing userbase and gain some benefit from them and them not just be a cost sink of lurkers.
For one thing, half the active users don’t want the platform to grow and retain more users. That’s not going to work. We need new users to keep the flow of content and discussions. People will inevitably leave, die, post and consume less and less as their lives change etc. If we don’t get new users we won’t be around long term.
The other problem though is that the lack of an algorithm turns off a lot of people who can’t find anything. Lemmy isn’t easily searchable, content is hard to find again if you don’t interact with it the first time you see it by commenting saving etc. the search function isn’t refined enough to allow you to find things quickly across instances or even just in one instance. Add to that that you don’t get a whole curated feed based on the things you do interact with, and the lack of one to one communities to equivalent subreddits and you’ve got a major problem.
Niche communities won’t show up here unless they have a community behind them and a community needs people.
Plus the toxic minority here is very loud just because there’s not that many users in comparison to literally most other mainstream social media.
Reddit cannot die unless their management does some insane thing that affects majority of user base. Killing 3rd party apps impacted a small minority so it was largely nothing. It is way too popular and useful to die at this point.
As for Lemmy, will be interesting to see how eventual operational cost problems will be resolved. Lemmy (Activity Pub?) is also pretty inefficient and does a lot of data duplication due to being decentralized. Centralized systems like Reddit are much more efficient.
Yup. I’m excited about P2P alternatives, where you get the benefits of centralization (one namespace like /r/whatever instead of instance/c/whatever) as well as the benefits of decentralization (no single point of failure).
Of you want to see an even more extreme example, look at how many people are still using Twitter despite all the shit getting pulled over there. Reddit’s shenanigans look tame by comparison.
Basically you want to write scraping solution specially for Reddit, it would be great if you started with scraping Frameworks like python scrapy framework
You can’t get any help here, since we’re the ones who got away from Reddit
i wonder if fatbird would use this…
Just leave that network behind
Just to add my thoughts, it was not closing free API that made me stop using Reddit. It was their management response / actions / not providing a viable API thus killing 3rd party apps. If management would have changed I would probably go back.
How they treated apollo dev was fucking disgusting.
Spez ist ein Hurensohn.
It’s the straw that broke the camels back. They been fucking users over for years before they did the API change.
Yup, I had been looking for alternatives for years, but none seemed “ready.” When the API change was announced, my definition of “ready” suddenly changed and I came to Lemmy. It’s good enough, but I’ll bail as soon as something better comes along.
I been quite cozy on Lemmy, it would really have to go down hill for me to find a replacement.
I think it’s fine, but the emotional downvotes really bother me (i.e. people seem to prefer consensus over quality of discuss, just look at any post criticizing Biden). That’s not different from Reddit, it’s just not better.
But there’s plenty of good discussion, so I’m happy for the time being. But I’m not really loyal to lemmy and don’t see much point in the fediverse/activitypub, so the only thing holding me here is the lack of a better alternative.
If I could access Reddit ad free via my own 3rd party app with no restrictions based on some monthly or yearly fee, I probably would pay that.
Reddit has issues which the fediverse solves. The fediverse has issues that Reddit solves.
Now that I am here tho, I wouldn’t go backEdit for typos
Youre on the wrong platform. This is lemmy
Don’t.
Take heed at the tale of Gary Bowser. Don’t engage in fan projects
This project is stupid and DOA. Find something more productive or fun to work on.
Please don’t take personal offense, but you have merely a project scaffold with an unrealistic goal that will be blocked and C&D’d into the ground, without any other projects created.
It doesn’t matter how hard you’re working on your anonymity, this project will be ripped apart by a horde of lawyers in seconds. You’re not only doing something questionable or against ToS, you’re directly attacking and sabotaging their monetization. This will not be taken lightly by the legal team of reddit.
You want to provide a better, cooler, more robust and other random buzzwords API than the own of reddit. So, you alone, want to provide a better API than the whole team of reddit does for their absolute core product, all by scraping. This is simply not realistic.
While we’re at the topic of monetization, scraping, ETL into your own model and providing the API - for the amount of content that reddit has (quantity, not quality) this will be a highly resource intensive task. How do you plan to fund that, since your API will be better than the official one, I can expect at least the same performance as well, right?
And also, most importantly, even if you magically achieve working around all that and get that working - why? Who is your expected user group? Pretty much every software using reddit moved away from reddit or simply has died. AI gen content is rampant, and most discussions seem like bots talking to bots. There is literally nothing to gain from an API to reddit - so why would anyone bother using it?
Now, if only to get their auto bots to stopping banning accounts for little to no reasons. If you disagree with the wrong mod or they don’t like what to you say, they ban you.
My 12yr old account got banned. I’m not worried about the link karma and comment karma.
Bro, just stop. You’ll get C&Ded. Stop thinking about reddit. Cut it out of your life. You don’t need it anymore. Nobody does. We will find another way without it.
Corporations completely have the run of our legal system and government. Boeing can murder whistleblowers and get away with it for fuck sake. Op is using fucking github for this. Even common sense opsec practices wouldn’t be enough. Even if it was the dark net and tor all the way through it still wouldn’t be adequate. They even posted about it on reddit. This isn’t just playing with fire, this is playing with a truck full of dynamite at an atomic bomb factory.
We already have a way. Lemmy, lemmy is the way
Lemmy is the worst form of social media, except for all the others that have been tried.
Lemmy? Never heard of it.
Well, lemme tell you about it…
No.
