this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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From the article:

"Moving to the Fediverse

This tension between these communities and their host have, again, fueled more interest in the Fediverse as a decentralized refuge. A social network built on an open protocol can afford some host-agnosticism, and allow communities to persist even if individual hosts fail or start to abuse their power. Unfortunately, discussions of Reddit-like fediverse services Lemmy and Kbin on Reddit were colored by paranoia after the company banned users and subreddits related to these projects (reportedly due to “spam”). While these accounts and subreddits have been reinstated, the potential for censorship around such projects has made a Reddit exodus feel more urgently necessary, as we saw last fall when Twitter cracked down on discussions of its Fediverse-alternative, Mastodon."

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (4 children)

This, I did not know:

Details about Reddit’s API-specific costs were not shared, but it is worth noting that an API request is commonly no more burdensome to a server than an HTML request, i.e. visiting or scraping a web page. Having an API just makes it easier for developers to maintain their automated requests.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, there's nothing special about an API. It's just a shortcut for the app to use to get specific info from the server.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Even worse, their official app uses the same API -- and, by estimates, the Reddit app uses more calls than Apollo does.

They wanted more per user than they will ever make. A multiple of that, in fact.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yep. This is Huffman having a tantrum because he found out someone is making enough money to live on with their coding, and his company isn't getting a slice.

RES is used by some significant percentage of Redditors and they take donations to fund their work. I'm willing to bet they're next on the chopping block of his tantrum.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (1 children)

To some extent, Reddit does get a slice - in the form of user engagement. User engagement is how they generate ad impressions, even if it's not from the users on the third party apps.

They COULD have simply put ads into the API, or made it a requirement. They didn't.

Their entire goal is to maximize "value" before their IPO. Control and number inflation. They don't care about the long term. Spez wants to cash out, and he doesn't care what it costs the company.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago

They COULD have simply put ads into the API, or made it a requirement. They didn’t.

OH, THIS THIS A BILLION TIMES THIS.

They shot themselves in the foot and are now angry about it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Fortunately something like RES doesn't need Reddit's blessing to exist. A browser extension that rearranges information the browser has already downloaded (to massively oversimplify what RES is doing) doesn't need API access.

They could shut down old reddit but the only reason RES doesn't support new reddit is that it would require rewriting the whole thing. If that was the only option, someone would eventually do it.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

RES is hanging onto life with its fingernails - it's been in maintenance mode for the past 18 months or so with only 2 people actively working on it (at its peak in 2015ish, I think this was closer to 30).

By their own admission, they wouldn't be able to survive any major breaking changes.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

Scraping is more burdensome for the platform since that serves up images, JavaScript, and other files required to render a page. Maybe dying I tools can avoid this.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

In general it's actually less burdensome.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Significantly so! An HTTP request probably means loading separate JS, CSS, and HTML documents. To say nothing of the weight of the requested page alone.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Greedy bastards