Electronic Frontier Foundation shouted out Lemmy, Kbin, and Mastodon in their Reddit coverage today: What Reddit Got Wrong
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."
This, I did not know:
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.
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.
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.
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.
OH, THIS THIS A BILLION TIMES THIS.
They shot themselves in the foot and are now angry about it.
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.
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.
In general it's actually less burdensome.
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.
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.
Greedy bastards