Asking third-party reddit app devs to consider Lemmy after recent Reddit API changes.
Asking third-party reddit app devs to consider Lemmy after recent Reddit API changes.
I've also cross-posted this post on other third-party apps' subs:
EDIT: Forgot to write a bit of an introduction of myself, hello to everyone here, long time redditor and someone who also happens to mod a lot of subs on reddit such as r/electricvehicles, r/trulyunpopularopinion and etc!
Though I love to moderate and contribute to this communities meaningfully, I never liked reddit, as a huge FOSS fan, and these recent API changes are freaking stupid as well, there wasn't a better reason for me to not consider moving to Lemmy. I will be speaking with a lot of other reddit mods in my own mod teams and some other friends, hopefully I can bring some subs/people here.
Speaking of bringing people, please do consider checking out these posts I've linked above, and consider upvoting them if you agree, this situation with third-party apps are a great opportunity for Lemmy, hopefully it reaches to the devs, and even if not all apps make a move, even one would be a win.
Thank you!
EDIT 2: Hey guys! I missed some third party apps on the list above, just updated them, and the new added ones are RIF, Joey, Get Narwhal and RedReader. UPDATE: Added ReddPlanet.
Please do consider visiting those that I just added and upvote them, so hopefully they can reach to respective developers!
This is a genius idea. Imagine all app developers get together and once reddit stops working they ALL from their app's interfaces recommend switching to a lemmy instance, and mention that lemmy will be supported on their app in near future.
This could be a massive blow to reddit since the traffic these apps contribute to is huge.
The reluctance of redditors to move to lemmy always amazes me.
Not surprisingly, there's a lot of posts in a lot of subs about the recently announced changes. In every post the same pattern is repeated ad-nauseum:
- "i hate reddit, it sucks here, I've always wanted to leave, I'm never coming back once this happens"
- "maybe we should move the sub to lemmy so we won't have this problem in future?"
- "but what about all our data, the wiki & post history and such"
- "but there's no users on lemmy"
- "but that would split the community!"
This is the case even in the subs I would have thought would be really keen to jump ship, like /r/selfhosted
I think this type of approach is the right idea though, a better ecosystem can only be good.
"but there's no users on lemmy"
It's definitely a chicken and the egg situation.
I've been lurking here the past few days when I saw lemmy as a reddit alternative. I decided to sign up today as lurking isn't doing this place any favors. Hopefully more people will sign up, and the momentum will build and continue.
It's a chicken and egg problem for sure, but what I find a bit funny in every case like this (Reddit -> Lemmy, Twitter -> Mastodon, etc) is when someone says "X doesn't have any users!" it makes me want to reply with something like:
Well of course, if X had anywhere near the population amount of [Reddit, Twitter, Etc] then its likely that these changes wouldn't be happening in the first place, to avoid a migration...
These companies think they (and unfortunately in a lot of cases, are) too big to fail, if there was a competitor out there that had another sizable slice of the pie, then I doubt they'd be making idiotic changes like this nonsense over the API.
I know that this is just how the network effect works, but it does make me laugh for a moment every once in a while.
I've been on lemmy for about a year, and this is the first time I've seen lemmy this consistently active.
It actually reminds me of reddit in the earlier years :')
Lemmy is just the latest in a very long line of potential reddit successors. Historically, you can't move a subreddit to a different platform because redditors are users of reddit, not users of your particular subreddit.
This is true, but of course individuals can choose to move.
This may not be a warm fuzzy thing to say, but I don't feel much of a "community" in reddit subs.
What I mean is that to me, 100 people reading a sub on lemmy once a week is just as useful as 1000 people reading a sub on reddit once a month. As in, I don't really care if the specific users from a reddit sub are here, just that there are some engaged users here.
Its funny to me that those of us posting viable alternatives in those threads get drowned out by doomerism (there's nothing we can do!!!). There are alternatives out there to reddit, and they're already better experiences.
It's really baffling. Especially because there are some solid but really small communities that would have a fairly easy time migrating but are still not even considering doing so because of the small userbase over here. These communities don't even benefit from the bigger userbase on reddit because the discussions are solely between the users that are subbed to the subreddits.
undefined> “but there’s no users on lemmy”
I mean that's a reasonable point. The amount of users is always important for a platform adaptation. But I see a good chance for Lemmy if/when Reddit removes/restricts all porn subs.. IF there's a place for it in Lemmy.
Message received. Hello from reddit!
I know it's unmaintained, but I really love the UI for "Slide for Reddit" and hope the dev for that picks it back up and maps the data inputs to Lemmy. Keep the UI exactly the same (maybe add tiny icons to the left of sublemmy names but that's it).
Agreed. I liked it so much i bought the pro version, shame I could only use it for a few months
Oh man, Slide is my go to for years! Such a clean no nonsense experience. Would love to see similar UI.
Let's get a hackathon going. Maybe it's possible to have a project which allows these apps to work with lemmy. I created a sub on reddit for it: https://www.reddit.com/r/apihackathon/
But maybe that's not the right spot - happy for someone to create a similar community here too.
I would love an app just like Sync that would work for Lemmy. Jerboa looks fairly close and quite similar just based on my very limited usage.
edit: clarification
I really hope ljdawson takes a look at this platform. However, in the last few years they have not been posting as many updates and I would not blame them for not starting a new project.
would be nice to see an app for linux mobile. I run postmarketOS on pinephone and pinetab, currently using gnome shell mobile. Of course, the lemmy website works great on all of my devices, but an app might be nice if I use this more to get notifications.
I use Tuba for Mastodon and thought I might be able to login to lemmy with it, but I guess not. I can see lemmy posts from there though.
@saba@lemmy.ml @Archit speaking of seeing the posts from mastodon... Hello me, it's me again!
Hello man!
Great job dude, hopefully it inspires more migration.
I could see infinity doing it the second they get the idea. Foss apps be like that.
I really hope so! It's just too good of a project to abandon.
Thank you for starting the discussion. I was previously using Boost and now checked out Jerboa. Since Jerboa was inspired by Boost the transition was actually quite easy. Although some functions I really liked, e.g. jumping/navigating through the main comments or adjusting the font size of comments (they appear a tad too big in this app) are still missing. I would really appreciate if this community grows and the 3rd-Party devs could improve the experience further. I also was getting a bit bored by reddit as there was a lot of repetition and decreasing quality in content (while the popularity was increasing). But browsing through Lemmy and watching the enthusiastic mood of the growing community feels exciting again!
Big agree man, I use apollo on iOS but before that used to use RIF, I certainly don't want to see the incredible third-party ecosystem die with reddit.
Hey that's great, thank you for doing this!
I also hope those app devs, who are much more skilled programmers than I am, would be willing to contribute to the two existing open-source apps: Jerboa for android, and Mlem for iOS. We could definitely use the help.
I will be speaking with a lot of other reddit mods in my own mod teams and some other friends, hopefully I can bring some subs/people here.
Also thank you for doing this. @nutomic@lemmy.ml and I would rather be spending our time coding, and less time telling people about Lemmy. Its something I'm not very good at, and don't like to do too often, and greatly appreciate it when others are willing to help us out there.
No problem man! Glad to be helping, huge fan of what you've been doing here, I see this third-party API changes on reddit as a huge opportunity for Lemmy, even if not Apollo, even if any ONE developer of third party app makes the jump here, then others are more likely to consider. I certainly don't want to see the fantastic third-party ecosystem die with reddit, instead move here where it's open source and API would probably never go behind paywall as per my understanding.
And totally get you, especially at this stage I get that devs would want to focus on the development side, doing my best to get the word out! Love ya for your efforts!
I wonder how hard it would be for Lemmy to expose a Reddit compatible API. That work would only have to be done once, and then all the apps could just switch endpoints instead of each app having to implement the Lemmy API.
This is just an uninformed take, and I don't want to give the idea I know what I'm saying:
Probably very hard for things beyond the most basic browsing within one instance. There's unavoidable interoperability features we would want here but have no equivalent in a reddit environment, and such apps would just feel too limited versus using a browser with the current Web UI. For example, a user posts from another instance and you click to check their posts, which turns out are all over the place in federated space. Even if we create an API layer that condenses all those requests to a simple single call we would do on Reddit, how to label those results for wherethey reside is still another small UI headache. And that's one problem view out of a couple dozen in the app, while merely assuming single-instance browsing.
But more drastically, Lemmy's moderation tools are probably heavily different from those on reddit. Even if they're similar in actions - they're absolutely going to be dissimilar in completeness, Reddit is much older than Lemmy and has that time advantage. I know a large part of people who moderate reddit did it using third party apps for ease of use on a phone, and that's a demographic that probably can't be captured very easily.
Some things certainly don't map 1:1, but my own uninformed take is that it's probably not that big of a problem.
For example, a user posts from another instance and you click to check their posts, which turns out are all over the place in federated space. Even if we create an API layer that condenses all those requests to a simple single call
Doesn't Lemmy already do this? I am posting from feddit.de, but when I click your username, I can see your posts on lemmy.ml - inside feddit.de, served by feddit.de. The only requests my browser makes to lemmy.ml are for things like avatars.
The only way to find out how big of a problem it really is is to try, which I think I will do if no one beats me to it.
Probably very difficult as reddit is easily a decade ahead of Lemmy.
It'd probably make more sense for the apps to adopt a plugin system whereby "fourth-party" developers can create add-ons for rif to access Lemmy, or bacon-reader to access mastodon, or reddplanet to access Facebook or Imgur.
This takes a lot of the load off the main third-party devs, and give the end-users a choice of using their favorite app with their service of choice, while keeping the apps themselves streamlined.
You missed a spot: RIF.
Oops, I actually did post there, just missed to mention RIF on the list here. I've updated it now, thanks!
@Archit this is a really great start! I upvoted all your posts over there...
I love using Relay, and if it ever adopts Lemmy support then I'd be using it for sure.
Maybe you want to address mastodon client devs as well… they are familiar with the protocol.
I've been using iOS app Ivory for Mastodon, and it's FANTASTIC. Little did I know, they also make my favorite calculator app, Calcbot.
I would love it if they swooped in and developed for Lemmy.
I'm here because of you. Loving your idea, and hoping they go for it. Because what the hell, Reddit.
Reddit banned him! They're freaking out so much.
Welcome! I hope you have a good time here man, if you got any questions don't hesitate to shoot em up :)
I only wonder what's the best way to advertise c/wish and why it or !wish@lemmy.ml isn't automatically made into a link :p
It's true, infinity for reddit is finite, it should be infinity for infinite websites /_\
@mordekaiq89 @Archit I just learned that "finity" is a word! Finity for Reddit!
Going to reddit to upvote, thanks for the effort!
Your welcome and thanks for upvoting! :)
Thanks for this 💜
did you also post this /ApolloApp? it sure would be nice if we got an Apollo-like app for lemmy!
Oh that's you! Happy to see that you spread the word.
Hey!!
https://old.reddit.com/user/that1communist/comments/ I've also been trying my best to convince people, if anyone would help i'd appreciate it.