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Teddit Is Shutting Down

tedd.it

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Re: Teddit Is Shutting Down

#101

Post by deeviant »

p-e-w wrote: post #79
chongli wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I'm honestly astonished to see how many smart folks are falling for their lies

What exactly are the lies? No one group is in control, each fiefdom is free to do what they wish, including not consorting with those they feel are of ill repute or temperament.

As far as being "politically charged", that's just the way the world (well, ok the US at least) is now. Blame the culture warriors who can only think in terms of how something fits or does not fit into their world view, and seek generally only to pander to their base.

Re: Teddit Is Shutting Down

#103

Post by gizmo686 »

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.

I have no idea what cratermoon is intending to talk about, but the usual way to solve this problem is attestation. At a high level, the client device has the secret, but it is embedded in a secure enclave that makes it difficult to extract. You then build a chain of trust from that secret that attests that the binary being run is the official one.

Android (at least with the standard Google services) seems to provide an implentation of this through the play integrety API [0]. I'm not familiar with the internals of that system, but I have worked on this type of system for a much more constrained use-case.

If I were designing this, my first pass at a napkin design would be:

* Devices running the app must have a TPM. This TPM is loaded with a private key that is intended to remain highly secret. Corresponding public key is well known.

* During boot, "everything" is measured into the TPM's Platform Configuration Registers (PCRs). To measure something into a PCR, you update the PCR value as: PCR[n] = hash(PCR[n] || measured_value).

* The TPM does not (in this use-case) have a notion of what the "correct" values of the PCRs are. However, it can use the secret key to sign the PCRs values. Forging this signature would require either breaking the underlying crypto, hacking the TPM, or learning the secret key contained within the TPM. To prevent replay attacks, the TPM includes a nonce sent by the server.

* The device sends the server a list of what firmware/kernel/OS it is running (everything that was measured into the TPM). The server determines what the PCR values for the claimed configuration should be, and validates the signature that the TPM generated

* You now know that the OS is "trusted", and can now trust the OS to verify that the app is signed by a given public certificate and is running in a sufficiently secure environment.

[0] https://developer.android.com/google/play/integrity

Re: Teddit Is Shutting Down

#104

Post by mvdtnz »

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.

No one (within the margin of error) has gone to "federated alternatives". No one cares about "federated" or "decentralised" or any of this nonesense.

Re: Teddit Is Shutting Down

#105

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Teddit Is Shutting Down

#106

Post by ProAm »

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 can't help but wonder — what is it that made everyone play by the rules?

Some developers got free passes. I know of some. Total level playing field.

Re: Teddit Is Shutting Down

#107

Post by 1473-bytes »

rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote: post #74
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 A…

That's what I did. Got a developer API key, patched the 3rd party app, good to go.

Re: Teddit Is Shutting Down

#108

Post by p-e-w »

deeviant wrote: post #101
p-e-w wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> I'm honestly astonished to see how many smart folks are falling for their lies What exactly are the lies? No one group is in control, each fiefdom is free to do what they wish, including not consorting with those they feel are of ill repute or temperament. As far as being "politically charged", that's just the way the world (well, ok the US at least) is now. Blame the culture warriors who can only think in terms of…

> No one group is in control, each fiefdom is free to do what they wish

That's not true in practice. The purpose of a social network is to communicate with others. Network effects ensure that the biggest instances grow ever bigger, and thus not federating with them effectively means not participating in the network. If those instances then impose their rules on other instances under threat of defederation, and further demand that other instances do the same, again under threat of defederation, the "free" network turns into a monoculture that is effectively controlled by whoever runs the most influential instances.

Claiming that you are still free to do as you wish under these circumstances is like claiming that you are free to do as you wish on the Internet, as long as you don't connect to any other computers.

Imagine if email, a truly federated system, worked that way. It would be utterly useless. "Sorry, you can't send mail to user@example.com, because example.com does not require other domains that send mail to it to abide by our code of conduct."

Re: Teddit Is Shutting Down

#109

Post by dimator »

syntaxing wrote: post #5

Kind of sad. I used to use libreddit or teddit for my reddit fix but they’re all broken now. Maybe it’s for the better so I can stop using reddit completely. With LLMs, it replaced most of my google and reddit needs anyways.

what? how do LLMs replace your reddit usage?

Re: Teddit Is Shutting Down

#110

Post by dimator »

ipcress_file wrote: post #13
MattGaiser wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The name most frequently used on the About page seems to be Teddit. https://tedd.it/about

The official instance is teddit.net The repository is here: https://codeberg.org/teddit/teddit Individual instances appear to be shutting down. This is one of them.

the ones that are not shut down are suffering the same slow death of "429" errors. it won't be long now.
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