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 could see infinity doing it the second they get the idea. Foss apps be like that.
I really hope so! It’s just too good of a project to abandon.
I know it’s unmaintained, but I really love the UI for “Slide for Reddit” and hope the dev for that picks it back up and maps the data inputs to Lemmy. Keep the UI exactly the same (maybe add tiny icons to the left of sublemmy names but that’s it).
Agreed. I liked it so much i bought the pro version, shame I could only use it for a few months
Oh man, Slide is my go to for years! Such a clean no nonsense experience. Would love to see similar UI.
Maybe you want to address mastodon client devs as well… they are familiar with the protocol.
I’ve been using iOS app Ivory for Mastodon, and it’s FANTASTIC. Little did I know, they also make my favorite calculator app, Calcbot.
I would love it if they swooped in and developed for Lemmy.
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I use redreader too, I was happy to see the developer post that they were considering reworking it for Lemmy. Hopefully they decide it’s worth their effort.
I love using Relay, and if it ever adopts Lemmy support then I’d be using it for sure.
Same. I always liked the app, but was recently blown away w/ how intuitive and clean their Android tablet interface was
i’m gonna like all of those linked reddit posts now!
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It’s true, infinity for reddit is finite, it should be infinity for infinite websites /_\
@mordekaiq89 @Archit I just learned that “finity” is a word! Finity for Reddit!
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.
Probably very difficult as reddit is easily a decade ahead of Lemmy.
It’d probably make more sense for the apps to adopt a plugin system whereby “fourth-party” developers can create add-ons for rif to access Lemmy, or bacon-reader to access mastodon, or reddplanet to access Facebook or Imgur.
This takes a lot of the load off the main third-party devs, and give the end-users a choice of using their favorite app with their service of choice, while keeping the apps themselves streamlined.
People are also creating new front-end web applications:
@Archit this is a really great start! I upvoted all your posts over there…
Thanks for this 💜
Great job dude, hopefully it inspires more migration.
The thing about most of these apps is that they are actually proprietary closed source and have advertisements to fund development/make money. I dont quite know how they could be convinced to develop an app for a platform that (I think) explicitly does not allow ads. I haven’t really used any of these except baconreader years ago so I’m really not sure how these apps are licensed.
However I hope some of them see the light of FOSS even on mobile platforms and decide to contribute to jerboa or even start a new Lemmy app.
Its not our preference of course, but they could make closed source apps for lemmy. I’d rather they build them out in the open, and they could still charge for them or accept donations if they like. Open source devs need to get paid too.
Is that really forbidden, though? Lemmy itself is open source, but that doesn’t mean clients are forced to be as well(there are plenty of closed source email clients, after all, even though the protocol is open).
and as a user, I can’t see paying for an app/subscription or using an app with ads when the website works well on mobile. Good luck to those devs though, I hope the ones that get most of their income from it can find new projects.
Which website are you referring to? I tried old.reddit on my mobile and fonts are so small (apparently it’s the desktop website) that posts were barely readable. And if you use the new reddit website (which pretty much sucks IMHO), you could as well use their app, because it’s literally the same (app might be a bit better in terms of usability). But the UI and the ads are pretty much the same.
The commenter above me is talking about trying to get some of the reddit 3rd-party app devs to come to lemmy and I was talking about the lemmy website on mobile, definitely not reddit. My experience was the same as yours in that regard.
While there are valid reasons to prefer a dedicated mobile app for lemmy, I think that the reason there were so many for reddit was that reddit’s mobile site was so terrible and so is their app.
That said, I’d still love to see some of these reddit app devs switch to making apps for lemmy(or kbin or other federated sites, possibly one app could do more than one type of server) because I think it would bring more attention and users here.
I paid for Relay Pro after trying a bunch of other apps. Mobile web sites can generally work well enough but I almost always prefer an app, because they can better incorporate mobile UX patterns/elements to make better use of the small screen. For example each post is wrapped in a tile with the headline and thumbnail displayed and I can swipe an individual post to see the controls (up/down vote, open link in browser, go right to comments, etc). Even on the mobile site theres too much clutter.
I definitely don’t like clutter! and that was the one of the biggest issues with reddit’s mobile site. I am trying out jerboa for lemmy on my android, just to compare. And I do hope more devs will work on lemmy clients. But for now, the web interface is a very usable fallback when compared to other mobile websites.
RedReader is FOSS and has been my favorite Reddit app experience for several years.
The dev has already expressed an interest in possibly refocusing on Lemmy, too.
It’s a bit of an off-topic given the reason why you’ve linked that Reddit post, but I’m analysing a few things that the RR dev said and I’ve noticed something:
The decision is controversial even within Reddit Inc., and whoever is taking the shots is not explaining it fully even to the people interacting with the third party devs.
This hints that there’s something really shady going on, like external intervention - but from whom?
Likely Project Managers, who are above the day-to-day developers. PMs take any product and squeeze the life out of it.
Ah, that explains it. A “middle caste” wouldn’t bother explaining its decisions to the “grunts”, even if the “grunts” would be better informed on the consequences of the decisions being taken.
This will backfire badly for Reddit - I predict that content creators and moderators will be specially affected by killing the third party apps. The platform will see a short-term increase of revenue, followed by a crash, as if they were killing and butchering a milk cow.
I’m here because of you. Loving your idea, and hoping they go for it. Because what the hell, Reddit.
Reddit banned him! They’re freaking out so much.
Welcome! I hope you have a good time here man, if you got any questions don’t hesitate to shoot em up :)
I only wonder what’s the best way to advertise c/wish and why it or !wish@lemmy.ml isn’t automatically made into a link :p
did you also post this /ApolloApp? it sure would be nice if we got an Apollo-like app for lemmy!
Looks like Jerboa is a mobile client for Lemmy developed by Lemmy devs. Using it now, not bad.
sadly, the only ios client has been abandoned. there’s another in development, but it’s not in the app store yet, and I don’t feel like downloading and compiling it myself, lol
There is one in development available on TestFlight for open testing
i found it and ddownloaded the app. there’s currently a bug that doesn’t allow you to log in, lol.
oh, well, I guess I’ll wait for an update!
Oh yes! The OG post is linked to my post on Apollo, the rest of my posts are linked on the description, let me add apollo on the description as well to make it clear.
gotcha. i’ll check it out!
Sounds good! And I update the list on the description.
