It appears API rate limiting has effectively killed these alternatives. You essentially get nothing but “Too many requests” 429 errors.
Lemmy sadly does not have the active niche news and discussions I want. But now nothing can be read without going to Reddit. I hate Spez
the biggest issue is that they detect thirdparty clients coded as a website parser on their server and just block you. and bypassing this isn’t really working well because of the rate limiting.
example: i just did send 3 requests where i first logged in, then asked for the recent posts of a sub… and already after this 2 requests i got rate limited by error 429 and couldn’t send any requests anymore.
so even just requesting the recent posts in a sub is an issue (with spoofed browser useragent). if you use a “legit” useragent it works better, but reddit exactly knows you’re using a thirdparty client and can block or ban you whenever they feel like. so it’s not really a good solution because every minute reddit could hit the killswitch. just not worth the time to develope a app if it gets killed off then anyway.
So no hope, I get it.
based on the knowledge, i would say nah. but maybe there is somewhere on the internet a genius who can somehow gets it to work stable enough… who knows.
i just checked the announcement of libreddit and it seems they used the same json endpoints i did for my project, so they probably encountered the same issues i did. and if they didn’t found a good solution yet (even after working way more with the API and endpoints than me)… dunno.