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Teddit Is Shutting Down

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Re: Teddit Is Shutting Down

#71

Post by LeSaucy »

zzleeper wrote: post #37
kumarvvr wrote: post #33

Reddit has allowed the third-party app system go too far and now they are struggling to contain it. I remember when Twitter did the same thing, but they realized it early and did it when there were not too many apps that users were used to. I feel Reddit will come out fine from this. A minor hiccup. Mods will be replaced, apps will be forgotten and users will talk about this whole thing in some AskReddit thread. The…

Are you sure? I've used Reddit for 15 years and it's the first time I don't really have a good way of using it, besides the desktop (on old.reddit). On mobile (where I used to spend reddit most time) their own app is so crap I don't even have it installed, so I have no easy way to browse. On Chrome I'm not even logged-in, so I only use it whenever a google search leads me there, but I don't post or do anything meanin…

The funny thing about the "good" ways of accessing reddit is that the community has already "ported" them to lemmy.

- https://github.com/rystaf/mlmym - old.reddit.com styled client for lemmy

- https://wefwef.app/posts/lemmy.world/all - voyager which is almost pixel perfect recreation of apollo (but in a web app that you can just "add to homepage" on ios)

Re: Teddit Is Shutting Down

#72

Post by chipotle_coyote »

grishka wrote: post #66
gochi wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most apps back then weren't staffed by hundreds/thousands of people with a giant legal team to enforce trademarks either.

Yes but there's definitely some kind of "fair use" allowed for trademarks. My own observations show that it's fine for a product to claim it's "for" or "compatible with" someone else's trademarked product. One example is third-party coffee capsules "for Nespresso machines", usually accompanied by "not affiliated with Nespresso". I'm sure Nespresso has an army of lawyers but these things continue to be sold all around…

In that specific case, it's because Nespresso's patent on the capsule design ran out and they can't stop other people from selling compatible capsules anymore. While they still had the patent, they went after third-party capsules pretty aggressively. There is no "fair use" clause for patents or trademarks the way there is for copyright, but patents expire much faster. (Trademarks do, too, although they can be renewed indefinitely -- but you have to do it affirmatively every 10 years in the US.)

With the necessary "not a lawyer" disclaimer in place: in the case of Reddit's APIs (or anyone else's), AFAIK the issue wouldn't a trademark or patent issue, per se -- an API can't be patented (or trademarked), and it's debatable whether they can be copyrighted. (A case between Oracle and Google involving Java's APIs made it all the way to the Supreme Court, which kind of punted on making a definitive legal decision as to the copyrightability of APIs.) But, making unauthorized use of them could almost certainly be classified as a breach of contract, e.g., a violation of the end-user license.

Re: Teddit Is Shutting Down

#73

Post by _hypx »

MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #15

> Lemmy is the New Reddit I hope so, but we need a winning instance first. When you search for Lemmy right now you're sent to a page that begins with "Join a Server... Run a Server". That kind of first experience will never replace Reddit. Lemmy.world seemed to be winning the SEO battles in my Google search. Is that a good one? Edit: Sorry for changing my entire post; I had incomplete information about Lemmy at the t…

Don't forget kbin!

Re: Teddit Is Shutting Down

#74

Post by rrrrrrrrrrrryan »

grishka wrote: post #30

Seeing all Reddit apps shut down, I can't help but wonder — what is it that made everyone play by the rules? What happened to the adversarial interoperability spirit? What forces people to use their own API keys instead of pretending to be one of the official apps? I can understand the iOS apps, the App Store hegemony does kinda force this and there were cases of Apple removing apps that interact with an online servi…

I thought this as well. I'm apparently a weirdo because I've just used the website for the past 14 years, on both desktop and mobile (though with an ad-blocker), but for all the folks that really love the alternative Android apps, why can't bring-your-own-key be an option?

The fact that they're installing an alternative app kinda makes them super-users of Reddit anyway, so asking them to generate their own personal API key shouldn't be too unreasonable.

It just seems strange that the app would choose to completely shut down instead.

Re: Teddit Is Shutting Down

#75

Post by add-sub-mul-div »

MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #15

> Lemmy is the New Reddit I hope so, but we need a winning instance first. When you search for Lemmy right now you're sent to a page that begins with "Join a Server... Run a Server". That kind of first experience will never replace Reddit. Lemmy.world seemed to be winning the SEO battles in my Google search. Is that a good one? Edit: Sorry for changing my entire post; I had incomplete information about Lemmy at the t…

> That kind of first experience will never replace Reddit.

Good. Let the eternal September remain on Reddit. The rest of us can go back to the roots of what keeps online communities from becoming cesspools like Reddit and Twitter.

Re: Teddit Is Shutting Down

#76

Post by LeFantome »

morserer wrote: post #65
grishka wrote: post #30

Seeing all Reddit apps shut down, I can't help but wonder — what is it that made everyone play by the rules? What happened to the adversarial interoperability spirit? What forces people to use their own API keys instead of pretending to be one of the official apps? I can understand the iOS apps, the App Store hegemony does kinda force this and there were cases of Apple removing apps that interact with an online servi…

Not an expert, but I wonder if all the redditors who would be mad about it have already jumped ship and gone to federated alternatives, and all the redditors who are left are the ones who don't care and are watching the chaos with popcorn. If you're asking about the moderators, they were forced to either reopen or be un-modded. They did what they could.

What alternatives? I am here because I lost access to Reddit.

Lemmy is not a replacement. A totally different experience for every sub-Reddit is not going to work.

Reddit was pitched as The Front Page of the Internet. Where is the front page of Lemmy?

Re: Teddit Is Shutting Down

#77

Post by cratermoon »

grishka wrote: post #58
cratermoon wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What forces people to use their own API keys instead of pretending to be one of the official apps? The fact that without the associated secret, an API key is useless.

What do you mean by that? An API key usually is the secret. And everything needed to access the API must by definition be contained in the client app, so it's only a question of reverse engineering enough of it to extract these parameters.

This is why I get paid big bucks to investigate and remediate security problems in applications and systems.

Re: Teddit Is Shutting Down

#78

Post by LeFantome »

chongli wrote: post #40
MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #15

> Lemmy is the New Reddit I hope so, but we need a winning instance first. When you search for Lemmy right now you're sent to a page that begins with "Join a Server... Run a Server". That kind of first experience will never replace Reddit. Lemmy.world seemed to be winning the SEO battles in my Google search. Is that a good one? Edit: Sorry for changing my entire post; I had incomplete information about Lemmy at the t…

a winning instance That would defeat the purpose. Lemmy is a fediverse application. The whole point is decentralization. A winning instance would concentrate power in the hands of one admin. We don’t want that!

Centralization was literally the entire point of Reddit for anybody that visited more than one sub.

We already had a decentralized Reddit—-it is called The Internet.

Re: Teddit Is Shutting Down

#79

Post by p-e-w »

chongli wrote: post #40
MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #15

> Lemmy is the New Reddit I hope so, but we need a winning instance first. When you search for Lemmy right now you're sent to a page that begins with "Join a Server... Run a Server". That kind of first experience will never replace Reddit. Lemmy.world seemed to be winning the SEO battles in my Google search. Is that a good one? Edit: Sorry for changing my entire post; I had incomplete information about Lemmy at the t…

a winning instance That would defeat the purpose. Lemmy is a fediverse application. The whole point is decentralization. A winning instance would concentrate power in the hands of one admin. We don’t want that!

> Lemmy is a fediverse application. The whole point is decentralization.

No, that's just a marketing lie.

The biggest instances have politically-charged "codes of conduct" that other instances are forced to adopt or be defederated. IIRC, some instances even require those rules to be applied transitively, that is, they will defederate from your instance unless you enforce their rules on all instances that you federate with, and so on.

The whole point of Lemmy and Mastodon is political control, while convincing people that it isn't so. I'm honestly astonished to see how many smart folks are falling for their lies; mostly, I suspect, because the Fediverse's political leanings pander to their own biases.

Re: Teddit Is Shutting Down

#80

Post by unforeseen9991 »

pyeri wrote: post #63
grishka wrote: post #30

Seeing all Reddit apps shut down, I can't help but wonder — what is it that made everyone play by the rules? What happened to the adversarial interoperability spirit? What forces people to use their own API keys instead of pretending to be one of the official apps? I can understand the iOS apps, the App Store hegemony does kinda force this and there were cases of Apple removing apps that interact with an online servi…

>> It wasn't always like this. 15 years ago, when ICQ was huge, everything with a screen, keyboard, a network interface, and a way to run arbitrary code had an unofficial ICQ client for it. Most people haven't ever seen the official clients. That's just one example. What happened? Crony capitalism and big tech monopoly is what happened. These companies achieved success by doing innovations once but today they no long…

That's part of what happened, but I think the reason that crony capitalism happened in the first place was the demographics changed. Companies don't "want" do to anything but exploit something to make a profit.

When ICQ was huge, it wasn't your average joe sixpack using the internet. Now that it is, there's a lot of money to be made.

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