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.
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.
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 non-thread conversation that rarely ever followed the OP content. So it’s just a bunch of AI chatbots talking to each other about nothing. That didn’t take long.
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.
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.
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.
We still do sadly.
It gets really bad when people doesn’t want to even pirate it.
Early days is one thing, but if this is the entirety of the code
# WIP
Then there isn’t much to have a discussion about…
I beg to differ, its in the planning stages at the moment, as such i am here to collect ideas for its development. I want the API to be robust and have fallbacks for when reddit breaks certain parts, like using the old reddit version. This is a big task, and it needs to be planned right.
Never cared much for reddit, finding lemmy way more interesting anyway.
I don’t think Lemmy will end up being much more different than Reddit. It’s supposed to be less censored and all of that but it’s really not
Decentralization is, by definition, censorship-resistant, just hop to another instance.
There is censorship, but i think it’s on par with reddit. Were i to post some of the stuff i post here on lemmy on mastodon instead i’d have my account banned. Speaking from experience.
I’ve gotten banned from places on here for simply stating facts that certain people don’t like and yes, you can move to another instance but there are only a few instances where you can reach a decent sized audience.
True… I’m more of following hashtags, don’t really care for an audience.