It is so sad that loyal reddit users got to care about this.

kratoz29@lemm.ee to Reddit@lemmy.world – 157 points –
imgur.com

Relay for Reddit app stays as one of the few remaining third party apps for Reddit and they are forced to go to a subscription model but the cost of such a subscription is related to how many API calls per user are done.

This screenshot was taken from the yet working patched Sync for Reddit app.

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Your users shouldn't even really need to know what an API is, much less be rationing requests like it's early SMS plans or something, geez.

And mind you, the only reason early SMS messages were so expensive was... because they could. The SMS protocol literally piggybacks on existing handshake datastreams already present in the GSM standard and only requires adding a small message handling server to a carrier's network. But because it was new and a novelty, and little to no competition existed in the cellular space, cellular companies (being the money grabbing corporations they are) would charge exorbitant rates for this add-on service that cost almost nothing to provide. Which is effectively reddit's stance too... fuck you, pay me.

SMS was free on some networks initially. They only even realised they could charge for it later.

😂

Inb4 buying Reddit API coin cards in your closest store.

That’s messed up. I wouldn’t put up with that shit. It’s like counting digital calories

LMAO yeah, that's an exclusive way to put it.

The message should shift from pressuring Reddit to change to pressuring users to leave. Reddit is fully aware of the consequences of their actions and won't do a 180 and start acting in the best interests of their users again. They're in too deep.

Users of Reddit should accept the fact that no social media is worth micro-managing every button press in fear of incurring a cost of any kind. I'm sure Relay's devs are doing the best they can, but the users need to take a look in the mirror and ask themselves if they're going to let a tech company push them around like this for the sake of internet content.

Their bullshit AMA about third party apps and general "it'll all blow over in a week" attitude should've made that apparent to more people. It's why I left as soon as RIF stopped working, and why many of us are here now.

I'll never give that shitshow of a website any traffic again

Yeah, I was planning on doing the same, leaving when RIF shut down. Though I came to the same realization that you did, and just left a week early, because it felt wrong to delay the inevitable and sink time into a platform I knew I wouldn't be using in a week's time. I'm glad that a lot of people came to the same realization as well, and hopefully a lot more Reddit users do too. Social media addiction is a bitch.

It was obvious right from the outset that Reddit's assertions as to the costs and motivations were not remotely genuine.

There was a comment early on to the effect of "it should only cost about $1 per user per month". Were that in fact the case, they could easily have added their own payment method to collect said dollar directly from users, allowing API / 3rd-party client access on a per-account basis. No weird limitations, just the experience you were already enjoying for a nominal fee.

The whole principle was from the outset pants-on-head idiotic, and it's clear the few times I have been to Reddit since that both the quality and quantity of content has noticeably reduced. Who could have predicted that the "freeloading" 3rd-party app users were the ones providing the bulk of the content (y'know, that content that, for all purposes, is Reddit, and they get to sell ads against).

Reddit’s only allowing a handful of these apps to limp along for now to keep up the fiction that they didn’t kill 3rd-party apps altogether. These devs are doing all this work to eke out revenue models based on hypothetical costs that can change any time Reddit updates their APIs, changes API call pricing, or updates the site’s functionality. Reddit’s management was completely unrepentant about lying to and about 3rd-party devs just a couple of months ago, and all of the risk around underestimating API costs are on these devs. I hope that none of them get billed or sued into bankruptcy over this.

I am still astonished that there are people over there still dealing with this shit.

mindblown.jpg

For real, does the Relay dev even get a proper cut?

He may add on top but people don't seem to realize it's going to reddit

They're literally supporting Reddit for a shitty user experience

Thanks for sharing!

FYI, direct image

img

Tha't indeed messed up

Thanks, I don't know how to do that when submitting posts, sadly my instance only supports 100 kb files BTW ☠️

It's like when you used to pay for internet by the minute. Is it worth seeing what that picture will look like in 4 minutes when it's done downloading?

I just went through that thread of people assessing how much they'll need to pay.

https://old.reddit.com/r/RelayForReddit/comments/15twxmy/in_the_latest_release_of_relay_you_can_now_see/

What the hell.

Yeah man, I mean, I appreciate the effort, but I think it would have been better if dev moved here like Sync and Boost devs.

Why staying with a company who does not want you?

AFAIK, they are the only ones why stay there.

Which one was it again who did the app for tildes? Anyway, good to have Sync and Boost here

That was a ride. I'm poor AF but even if I wasn't I can't see myself coughing up money for reddit.

lucky for them soon reddit will be a ghost town, so api calls will be very reasonable vs subscription price I guess. thanks SPEZ!

If my patched version of revanced ever stops I can't say I'll ever go back to all my lovely lil niche subs.

just stop using that shit site lol, these people are ridiculous

At least they have a subscription model based on fees incurred by accessing the reddit API. Sync for lemmy charging a monthly sub to remove the adds the creator put in.

You do know you can pay one time if you just want to remove ads. You're here suggesting the dev should just work on the app for free or something?

You're here suggesting the dev should just work on the app for free or something?

According to what he replied to you, yes...

Relay has a reason to charge a monthly fee, and sync does not.

A developer wanting to get something in return for their work is a reason. It's also an option for the user. Sync offers a one time payment for Ad Free and for their "Plus" features. It also has the option for a monthly subscription.

135$ for the full app.. sync is like the star citizen of lemmy apps

I have a rooted device with AdAway and that is backed up by Adguard Home running on my network so I can use Sync without ads at no costs. And I uninstalled it after a few days. Now that Infinity (now called Eternity) released, there will be no looking back to it from me. I even will prefer Jerboa over Sync when Jerboa gets default comment sorting. Sync is really over-rated in my opinion.

I've tried every lemmy client but only Jerboa, Eternity, and Voyager remain on my phone right now.

Thanks for the tip, I'll have to check eternity out. Any advice for the pihole, I've been thinking of getting one of them

If you only want to run pihole or adguard home for ads then just buy a used Pi3 on eBay for $15-$30 and follow the instructions on pi-hole.net

But if you want to get into selfhosting other things, and it's highly likely you will go down that rabbit hole, it's addictive, then I would recommend starting with a used ThinkCentre M93p from eBay for $80-$120. Install OpenMediaVault on it, get your feet wet setting up a few services with docker. Some of the more popular services selfhosters run are: pihole, airsonic, nextcloud, paperless-ngx, immich, sonarr, lidarr... I could go on, but I don't want to overwhelm you. If you are interested in the other things, take a look at this extensive list of selfhostable services, and sub to the selfhosting sublems. The selfhosting communities are pretty active and friendly here on Lemmy.

took your advice and got a pihole setup in docker. pretty fkn amazing. thanks the help

Id suggest Proxmox as a great starter, some amazing scripts out there, supports some GPUs passed through to containers and VMs with tweaks

Why do you say that? I'm interested in your opinion because I disagree. To be clear, I think proxmox is great, I just don't feel it's for the beginner.

My take on proxmox is that it's great if you have actual server grade hardware that can handle multiple VMs and/or you want to do clustering. Neither of which I feel, a beginner would be attempting. I don't even consider it for myself as I run on two SFFs PCs and I would see no benefit setting up proxmox > OMV instead of just installing OMV directly on them. Now if at some point I add more SFF PCS and want to cluster them or alternatively decide that I want to get rid of having multiple SFF PCs and run one singular, more powerful server, then I would see a benefit from proxmox... but not as it stands.

My take on the various options are this:

Tipi, Umbrel, CasaOS, YunoHost - Meant for average users that don't want to spend any time on setup. Very easy to use, but also extremely limited walled gardens.

UnRaid - Much less limited then the above, but does force use of their UI often and in many cases is less efficient and frustrating if not downright incapable of accomplishing certain things. Meant for beginners that rely on UI.

OpenMediaVault - Basically Debian with an webadmin panel and the most common server services ready to install pre-configured with the most common + secure settings. So for beginners they can use the UI to setup shares and schedule jobs and containers and anything else really, but if they want to learn how to do things in the terminal then it doesn't get in the way; I like that it gives you the freedom to do anything you want with it.

TrueNAS Scale - Great option if scaling out with additional hardware and your main concern is data storage. But I feel that unless you're a member of datahoarder and have larger drive pools, this isn't the best choice either. It does sometimes lock you into the GUI too, at least when I tried it earlier in their releases. Maybe that has changed now, but they wanted to force the UI with a lot of docker container setup which I found annoying.

So given this, I recommend OpenMediaVault to most selfhosters, beginners and more advanced users alike, as it gives the most freedom aside from configuring everything yourself on something like Ubuntu Server/openSuse/Debian/(pick your favorite flavor). I think Proxmox is great for the applications I mentioned initially (VMs on performant hardware, or clustering of multiple machines), but I just don't see any benefit of it for a beginner nor if you are only going to have one or two lower powered machine like SBCs or SFF PCs.

But like I said, I'm interested in your opinion on why you would recommend it to a beginner. Or how you feel about my takes on these options.

Proxmox Helper Scripts are an easy way to get a homelab setup, I've found its as complex as you want it to be:

https://tteck.github.io/Proxmox/

Easy to make a ZFS pool and share that to a container / VM. Pass-through a GPU to a VM / Container for transcoding. Plenty of tutorials online for these features.

I'm running some old hardware on my setup currently, 64gb ddr4 x99 platform with no issues and planning on moving to a more recent Intel consumer platform.

OMV can be run in a VM / Container on proxmox, but I find that's redundant for a single node when using ZFS.

I feel the small hump in initial configuration of proxmox is worth the payoff for long-term expandability.

Saying so my views may be skewed as I migrated from w10 pro to proxmox, I've delt with some issues (from my lack of understanding of the platform), had some complete rebuilds of containers and am still dealing with the pains of having upgraded to the unstable channel; trying to migrate back to the stable channel.

All proxmox aside I'm planning on moving everything over to nixos after having it installed on my desktop and laptop for a few weeks now.

Proxmox Helper Scripts are an easy way to get a homelab setup, I’ve found its as complex as you want it to be:

https://tteck.github.io/Proxmox/

I wouldn't recommend inputting online scripts into bash to anyone without reading through it and understanding it firstly. It's okay for you to make that risk assessment and decision for yourself, but I just couldn't recommend it to another person. And I definitely would not want to condition a beginner into those kinds of habits.

In reference to beginners, I think the entire concept of proxmox and VMs and LXCs is a lot more to take in and understand than any of the other platforms that I mentioned using docker containers. It's much easier to understand, this docker container provides this one applications/service instead of organizing and configuring LXCs to do different services. It is quite a lot more manual configuration (unless you are using the scripts you mentioned, which I would not recommend). You also have to manage your VMs and LXCs system resources, among other things that you don't have to do in these other platforms using docker containers. It's just a lot more to take in, for benefits that I don't think most beginners are going to ever take advantage of. And many of those benefits can be seen with TrueNAS Scale in regards to using ZFS, expandability, etc. while not dealing with the aforementioned LXC/VM headaches. TrueNAS Scale, UnRaid, OMV are docker ready out of the box within a couple of clicks in the UI... and that's how most home selfhosters are spinning up services. Think about what it takes to get docker ready in proxmox without those user helper scripts. Also in regards to hardware passthrough, docker can also do hardware passthrough with the --device flag on any of these other platforms.

I think proxmox is great as an overall management tool if you have server grade hardware or very powerful machines where you'll be running multiple VMs or LXCs. But for beginners that just want to spin up some docker containers or selfhosters that are conscious about power consumption and want to purposely run lower power machines, than I still wouldn't see myself recommending it.

Thank you very much for this info.

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Dude, I don't care, I use Sync and pay no shit, but I would gladly do so when it gets more robust (and I already think it is one of the best).

We already have some great options, myself am rocking Voyager, Sync and Summit whenever I feel like to.

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