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Sync will shut down on June 30

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Re: Sync will shut down on June 30

#91

Post by jjcm »

qingcharles wrote: post #79
jjcm wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an unlaunched open source reddit alternative. Before I go into that too much though, note that there are a bunch: https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/ My vision: Free to browse, subscription to interact. You choose your subscription amount. I take $1 to run the server, anything beyond that gets split evenly between everything you upvote that month. For the $1, I give 30% of the cut to any 3rd party app…

Login needs an email address? (hackernews is rejected)

Doh! You’d think I’d know my own login requirements. j+hn@jjcm.org is the email I used for that test account

Re: Sync will shut down on June 30

#92

Post by dicknuckle »

qingcharles wrote: post #79
jjcm wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an unlaunched open source reddit alternative. Before I go into that too much though, note that there are a bunch: https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/ My vision: Free to browse, subscription to interact. You choose your subscription amount. I take $1 to run the server, anything beyond that gets split evenly between everything you upvote that month. For the $1, I give 30% of the cut to any 3rd party app…

Login needs an email address? (hackernews is rejected)

Same issue for me. Tried hackernews@non.io as well.

Re: Sync will shut down on June 30

#93

Post by jjcm »

cl1nk wrote: post #90
jjcm wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is 100% correct! I'm prioritizing self-hosted OC over external linking, mainly because my priority was finding a way to reward creators. Allowing external links would be fairly trivial, but I'd have to think through the monetization aspects of that. Not sure if I have the right model, but my hope is that since it's open source even if I go wrong someone else can find the right one. Also thank you for the kind wo…

Start promoting this soon, if you gain traction in the NSFW subreddits, this would blow up

High risk high reward! I do have nsfw tags and logic baked into the site, but it is risky if the site is perceived as being for nsfw content. Having it is fine, it being the main use case though means I wouldn’t be able to use Stripe as a payment provider.

Re: Sync will shut down on June 30

#94

Post by robocat »

vanilla_nut wrote: post #55
dilap wrote: post #23

Rather than shut down, it would be a great time for all these clients to get together and decide on an official alternative site to reddit, and start supporting that. If they did it en-masse and in a coordinated fashion, it might be enough social momentum to achieve escape velocity on the new site.

Combining tons of disparate web forums under a single toxic leadership is what caused these issues in the first place. I would far prefer either something federated (in the Fediverse sense) or a decent lightweight reddit alternative with no shared accounts, and thus less incentive for karma farming and voting manipulation. Coincidentally, the forum we're commenting on right now uses a fork of the original Reddit code…

> Coincidentally, the forum we're commenting on right now uses a fork of the original Reddit codebase

The current codebase was developed from scratch - zero forking - from what I can see.

HN is written in ARC http://www.paulgraham.com/arc.html which is a language designed by Paul Graham.

Here’s a thread talking about the early days of HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27452276 and it mentions “The earliest version of HN I can find; 166 LOC” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=723767

Here’s Paul talking about the release of HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html

AFAIK this is the latest public copy of the HN code, but it is significantly outdated: https://github.com/wting/hackernews/blob/master/news.arc

Re: Sync will shut down on June 30

#95

Post by johnnyanmac »

mort96 wrote: post #35
dilap wrote: post #23

Rather than shut down, it would be a great time for all these clients to get together and decide on an official alternative site to reddit, and start supporting that. If they did it en-masse and in a coordinated fashion, it might be enough social momentum to achieve escape velocity on the new site.

Building an alternative to Reddit is actually incredibly hard, especially if you suddenly get a huge influx of new users. Not talking about the technical side of things, but the community. How should the developers of these clients feel certain that whatever alternative they decide to endorse won't end up like Voat?

>How should the developers of these clients feel certain that whatever alternative they decide to endorse won't end up like Voat?

Make sure the community has proper and sane moderators/admins and stamp that down before it flairs up. Because it's the internet, it will always flare up if unchecked.

But I get it, that involves trust in judgement, and the internet attracts some very zealous personalities that don't have that. You'd need someone with a proven record to champion that cause. I'm not sure who that is.

Re: Sync will shut down on June 30

#96

Post by johnnyanmac »

x0x0 wrote: post #58
mort96 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building an alternative to Reddit is actually incredibly hard, especially if you suddenly get a huge influx of new users. Not talking about the technical side of things, but the community. How should the developers of these clients feel certain that whatever alternative they decide to endorse won't end up like Voat?

Building an alternative to reddit generally is quite hard. Building a single subreddit (or handful, if they're interrelated) alternative seems way more doable. See eg thedonald which transitioned to an external forum until a mod shut it down because of (not really sure, I didn't follow, but it was a working site for a couple years.)

I'd be interested. If there was something that was even 1% as large as r/games I'd be fine weaning off. Hopefully a community that isn't hellbent on bashing anything that isn't a console game.

Most of my tech subs are covered pretty well here, but not media.

Re: Sync will shut down on June 30

#97

Post by johnnyanmac »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #46
dilap wrote: post #23

Rather than shut down, it would be a great time for all these clients to get together and decide on an official alternative site to reddit, and start supporting that. If they did it en-masse and in a coordinated fashion, it might be enough social momentum to achieve escape velocity on the new site.

The simple fact is that you need money to host a site, to have moderation, to develop and maintain features etc. The problem apps are shutting down is because they don't want to loose money. If they make a new site, they will likely loose even more money. And they likely can't get profitable without resorting to same scummy behaviour as reddit.

>The problem apps are shutting down is because they don't want to loose money. If they make a new site, they will likely loose even more money.

Given the quotes I heard, I'd be very surprised if you lost more money in say, 2 years of building and hosting a new site than trying to even support a month of API calls from reddit c. July 2023.

You can certainly make a decent front end for little cost (even if we're talking about paying competitive rates to a few talented mobile devs) and a small backend won't cost much more. It's always about the community to gather to make all that work. That's the hard part.

Re: Sync will shut down on June 30

#98

Post by willis936 »

web11 wrote: post #83
willis936 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit is not too big to fail.

is not it in the top 5/10 websites in the world?

How does that make it too big to fail?

Are people worried about their deposits? Was Twitter too big to fail? Myspace? Digg?

Re: Sync will shut down on June 30

#99

Post by Avamander »

teruakohatu wrote: post #77
andrewstuart wrote: post #62

It's like Twitter. The next Reddit CEO will turn up and their grand plan will be to invert whether or not the company loves/hates developers using their API. Then they'll try to convince developers to come back, because "this time I've really changed".

I don't think we have ever seen such a reversal, the closest might be Microsoft's attitude towards open source, but that is apples and oranges. Facebook used to be more open. You could connect to Facebook Messenger using any Jabber/XMPP. They never reversed course, if anything they made it harder to use Messenger without the application.

Microsoft would turn back the moment they could, if it made business sense. Right now though, they have to play nicer or get left out.

Re: Sync will shut down on June 30

#100

Post by lopkeny12ko »

Many moons ago, I distributed a mobile app that was effectively just a UI client into a SaaS API. The first step in the setup was to login to your account in a web browser, obtain an API key, and paste it into my app. This was the key used to authenticate and authorize all requests to the third party API.

Why can't the same flow be used here? Just require users to obtain their own Reddit API key, and let the app be a thin client that doesn't ship with any keys owned by the devs themselves. I'd be happy to pay-for-my-own API usage.

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