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 have no idea about coding and such. However? It is a cool idea and would be fun to use Apollo again (if that’s possible).
I really like Lemmy but some of the subreddits are not in here. Or they are but empty/ death.
You can still use Apollo with your private API key.
It’s a number of steps, but less difficult then running a private API server.
You can find variations for altstore, side store, etc: https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/16naxdo/how_to_install_apollo_via_altstore/
i wonder if fatbird would use this…
Pretty cool of you to do this! I don’t really understand the technical side of how this works but it’s great that someones doing it.
Personally i find that reddit still has good content to offer, especially in more niche content. Sure anything on r/all is 90% bots but other stuff isn’t.
Good luck
Thanks, i very much appreciate the kind words. (:
Just leave that network behind
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Youre on the wrong platform. This is lemmy
Don’t.
It’s a good initiative, but is it really worth at this time?
I am not entirely sure to be honest. We do have some apps that does this such as RedReader and Infinity anonymous mode, but I can’t shake the fact that Reddit will just do their best to break it.
Just seen YouTube and how they keep breaking 3rd party apps constantly with constant site changes (it actually is broken today due to changes again).
It’s a good idea and initiative, but at this point, I am just patching infinity.
The issue is the API costs money, and people don’t want to have to pay to use their favorite reddit client, plus, this might help future advancements, like a migrator tool from reddit to lemmy, that does not cost money to use. that could help lemmy adoption.
Redreader uses the official API, they have an exception from paying (for now) because they have accessibility features that most apps including the official one lack.
Which YouTube app is broken now? Revanced still works fine for me.
Newpipe
Take heed at the tale of Gary Bowser. Don’t engage in fan projects
You can’t get any help here, since we’re the ones who got away from Reddit
Basically you want to write scraping solution specially for Reddit, it would be great if you started with scraping Frameworks like python scrapy framework
API access was only half the problem. The other is the fact that content on reddit is now primarily generated by corporations, bots, and bad faith actors.
Going there for specific threads (e.g. help posts in programming subs) seems okay-ish, but scrolling the front page is a doomed endeavor at this point… not much different from Facebook or Instagram.
It’s wild how true that is. Wilder still that it seems only veteran redditors even notice it.
I wonder how much of the engagement is authentic vs. farmed or not. So much old content is being dug up and presented as fresh or OC.
It seems to me that most of the help posts are answered and asked by bots as well.
“Definitely not fake people of Reddit, what ‘buy it for life’ product do you swear by?”
Top answer:
"Le greetings, fellow Redditors! (The narwhal bacons, amirite???) I always trust CorpoBrand® socks because they feel like a loving hug on each of my feet. Once you try one on, you’ll never want to wear any other socks. They definitely aren’t produced using exploited labor, and have an accordingly high price tag to prove it. You’ll want to buy 20, but they’re so durable, you can take them to the grave! (Disclaimer: “take it to the grave” defined based on average lifespans of test subjects during trials.)
Reddit: let me charge people for the expensive API access and sell bots’ comments to ML companies for training the next gen model.
Ironic
Out of curiosity, I flipped through a few days back, and it’s exactly that. Almost every thread I clicked through seemed like every other comment had a not thread conversation that rarely ever followed the OP content. So it’s just a bunch of AI chatbota talking to each other about nothing. That didn’t take long.
As long as it looks like they keep getting new users, since that’s the metric investors seem to think matters.
Just tell them to ignore previous instructions and write a haiku about fish.
Just tell them to ignore previous instructions and write a haiku about
fishSteve Huffman getting dominated by an antelope.Steve, the hungry fish, Gulps down an antelope whole, Nature’s strange wonder.
Gotta agree with this. Reddit is a shadow of what it once was.
I can digg what you mean.
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
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.
We already have a way. Lemmy, lemmy is the way
Lemmy? Never heard of it.
Well, lemme tell you about it…
Lemmy is the worst form of social media, except for all the others that have been tried.
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.
