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!
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.