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!
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.
i’m gonna like all of those linked reddit posts now!
I could see infinity doing it the second they get the idea. Foss apps be like that.
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!
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.
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.
Hmm I think that normally it is legit hard to move a community to a new server/system. Even a small one. It was tried with a german subreddit to feddit.de and it failed.
Right now there’s a lot of momentum, probably because reddit fucked up.
