It is so frustrating seeing how people received the protest.
“it’s not working” “Reddit doesn’t care” “they can do whatever they want”.
Well yeah, if that’s the attitude!
How do people not see that the protest disrupted the entirity of Reddit? Just about every weekly active user felt it.
How do they not understand the impact on revenue (especially ads), and how Reddit cannot feasibly sustain it, and were banking on the idea that it’ll eventually die down?
The fact of the matter is, if Reddit became worried that the protest will continue in strength indefinitely, they would be forced to roll back. The loss impact would greatly outweigh whatever measly profits they make from this API change that no one will buy.
Yes, this was a lot more for Reddit than just profits. If Reddit had backed down, it would have impact much greater than just third party apps. It remind people once again that users hold the power when they’re United. They can decide how to run their communities. But Reddit just could not afford this to happen, which is why they fought to convince you that the protest isn’t working and you should back down. And unfortunately many of us did…
The apps are very bare bones yet, but Jerboa already allows using multiple accounts from different instances, which lets one participate in what can be expected to be groups of instances defederated from the rest.
Aggregating posts might or might not be desirable depending on each case, there are definitely many more options in a federated world.
Multiple feeds are also a missing feature, or what Reddit would call “multirreddits”. Lemmy is also still lacking an export/import feature, or GDPR request compliance. And the backend needs some better horizontal scaling.
There’s really a lot to do, but the upside is, this time it can’t be taken away.