The enshittification of Reddit has been evident ever since the new design rolled out. Unusable on mobile devices. Does less, using more memory and bandwidth.
When “New” Reddit came out, it was just shockingly bad. If they didn’t keep old.reddit.com online, they would have killed the site then. Until very recently I couldn’t even view all child comments within the main thread, and it still takes at least twice as long to load any page.
Coming to Lemmy has been a breath of fresh air. The site is much more responsive than Reddit despite most instances running on a single VPS or something.
That’s because the Lemmy webapp focuses on being lean and functional rather than shoving as much telemetry and megabytes of JavaScript bloat as they can to do LESS than the old Reddit webapp could while using 10-20 times MORE resources.
New Reddit is not completely unusable on an intermittent, crammed full 3G connection where Old Reddit just works, but is known to be actively user hostile and somehow cramming full a huge 1080p phone display with only 2 or 3 comments and having to preload for hours for a full thread.
Lemmy server is also blazing fast and being written in Rust which encourages memory safety does help it function better on smaller instances and serve both local and federated clients faster despite having less resources to do so. I really really hope this replaces Reddit in the mainstream and people learn basic concepts about federated media to future proof the free Internet.
It has been a real breath of fresh air and so far it seems more sustainable to spread the bandwidth between smaller instances than let a megacorp fund the infrastructure to serve everyone in a walled garden which will later be enshittified into garbage once a critical mass is already lured in.
EDIT: look for yourself and notice the difference on Firefox’s dev console network tab
You’re right! The front page of Reddit is nearly 8x larger than Lemmy.ml, and took almost 7x longer to load than Lemmy.
Uncached loading results:
Lemmy: 3.3 MB, 39 requests in 1.85 seconds
Old Reddit: 6.3 MB, 60 requests in 4.53 seconds
New Reddit: 24.5 MB, 351 requests in 12.21 seconds
The first issue I noticed with new reddit was the missing sidebar. Is that functionality that I should have easily found or is it still missing after all this time?
Burn it to the ground! I wish all top subreddits had the balls to go dark indefinitely to the point they have to backpedal or forcibly take over the subreddits. Burn it to the fucking ground!
r/ProgrammerHumor going permanently dark was a watershed moment for me
I don’t think any subs will stay permanently dark, their mods will be replaced eventually.
He ain’t got the balls to answer that.
Why the fuck did they even remotely think this would be a good idea anyway? There is literally 0 good will towards reddit right now and for good reason.
I’m on Lemmy now, so actually it was a brilliant idea
I just checked and my account on lemmy is 3 years old, I was waiting for all of you. At moments lemmy looked like it will take of by it self, but last few months was pretty quiet. I hope this is the push this community needs to succeed.
Reddit got too big for my taste since digg joined in, I don’t think this will kill it ( they have the data how many people is using it outiside official apps), but let’s make space out of it.
We just need a easy to use, beautiful mobile client and so many people will switch over to it.
Jerboa is pretty good tbh.
I’m using jerboa currently. Albeit very new to the app, but I’m still a bit put off by the lack of options for personization and features. It also desperately needs an in app browser so all the links stop sending me out of the app.
There is definitely potential here, but leaves a lot to be desired.
One can only dream that these canceled 3rd party clients might join some day. Hopefully some will be opensource or they decide to support any other platform.
It would’ve been great if they just collectively change to something else.
The Tafkars API might be helpful in that: Tafkars: Reddit-API proxy for Lemmy (help wanted). To quote,
- I’ve been working on a proxy that makes it possible for 3rd party Reddit apps to connect to Lemmy with minimal code changes. Ideally all that’s needed is to swap out the url for that of the proxy. Naturally it’s open source.
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While I agree that porting one of these great reddit clients to a new platform like Lemmy is the way to go, I don’t see why it should be done by the individual developer instead of treated as a community effort. We’ll just end up in the same boat again where he’s piggy backing on another project (Lemmy, etc) to build a closed-source business that only he profits from. And while I have no problem with people selling apps they wrote, if none of these developers are going to open source their work so that the community can participate, I’d rather see a longer term effort go into improving FOSS solutions.
All it took was for a few power users, aka content thieves, someone like MrBabyMan who’s spent all their conscious energy and time submitting entertaining content from other less user friendly platforms, to convince a majority of users on the internet to pay attention to reddit more.
Simply getting more content, regardless of its quality or dubious origin, only as long as it is interesting or entertaining, will draw more users here. This is probably not what people want, but that’s what it will take for Lemmy to take off.
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Those memes look organic and sustainably sourced, delightful!
It’s the IPO. This has been the plan since day one (or at least since Conde Nast). Reddit hasn’t been operating at a loss for almost twenty years out of the goodness of their heart. It doesn’t matter how much the users hate it, the users are what is for sale.
Do you expect this is a reflection of how Reddit will handle relations with its investors?
Holy shit, they killed him right there. They have put the thread in “sort by new” mode and I bet it’s just to bury that bomb as deep as they can.
Apollo didn’t auto switch it for me so it was at the top lol. Of course Spez ignored that one. He actually took a shot at Christian in another comment
Saw that. Glad lemmy is taking off.
Same. I just started today and I’m having fun with it. Feels like when I just started Reddit. Definitely not as many communities but I feel like it’ll get there.
I hopped onto Lemmy yesterday when I saw the news that Sync was shutting down. Already enjoying the communites more than I ever was on reddit.
Is Lemmy the biggest contender for a Reddit alternative rn?
It’s the only one I’ve heard of so I’d assume so but I’m also curious to know the answer to your question too.
It’s definitely one of the ones with the most promise. I say “one of the ones” because there’s also kbin and it literally doesn’t matter which one you use, you get the same content. Any new fediverse reddit-like that pops up is also swimming in the same stream, can only compete on features and administration, not on content lock-in. The fediverse is pretty dope.
My favourite part is when Christian
I’ve never tried Apollo, and haddent heard of it until the reddit api stuff happened, but I fully respect everything I’ve seen it’s dev do sense
I was reading an article from The Verge - they’ve linked all the juicy parts of the AMA. I don’t have a Reddit account anymore since hearing about what their plans were a few weeks ago. It looks like Reddit is facing a very real, self inflicted meltdown.
Fyi - it looks like the reviews for Reddit on the Google Play Store have been locked as well to prevent review bombing.
I feel like this move has nothing to do with investors and everything to do with setting the standard for big corps like Microsoft and Google to be able to scrape their massive amount of data to train next gen AIs. They know they have HUGE amount of data from now and for years and years ago. Content, created by others, then sold for enormous profit.
If he thinks locking down the API is going to stop them, he’s bumped his head. These companies have more than enough manpower to write and maintain an HTML scraper for Reddit.
Creating a web scraper vs actually maintaining one that is effective and works is two different things. It’s very easy to fight web scraping if you know what you are doing.
Right, but these are big companies with lots of talented programmers on hand. If anyone can overcome such an obstacle, it’s them.
Also, Google and Microsoft already have a search index full of Reddit content to scrape.
You are right. You would need a team of skilled scrapers and network engineers though would know how to get around rate limiters with some kind of external load balancer or something along those lines.
Rate limiters work on IP source. This is easily bypassed with a rotating proxy. There are even SaaS that offer this. The trick is to not use large subnets that can be easily blocked. You have to use a lot of random /32 IPs to be effective.
I mean AI is already stealing all art and images on the web without paying anything. They could just literally scrape and pay nothing. Web scraping isn’t illegal, they already do it, why would they pay anyone? Unless the law catches up about the rights to manufacture AI content based on ill-gotten data, then why would they pay what they don’t have to?
The thing I worry about whenever someone mentions this angle: What about Lemmy content? As the community moves away from the commercial platforms in favor of Lemmy, Bluesky, Mastodon etc. Then does that lower the legal barrier for AI companies to train on all this content for free? Is that shift in the legal vulnerability of public content something that users consider? Is that desirable to most users? Are people thinking about that?
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I’m with you on that. AI is the future. Just because xxx big corp is doing AI training for their closed source product doesnt mean that open source models won’t also benefit. If you post to a public space you should expect it to be read.
found a script that deletes all your posts and comments after scrambling them fuck spez and reddit at this point
I want a script that edits all my posts and comments to “Fuck /u/Spez”
While I appreciate Spez being burned at the stake, why are there so many fucking awards on things. People know that those directly contribute to Reddits revenue right?
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I hope most of them are those random free awards Reddit gives out sometimes
If there is a god then maybe.
unfortunately I think we’re pretty certain that god is dead and we killed him so…
Spez: “This is an askmeanything, not an answeranything.” sits in the corner eating popcorn the whole time
Spez:
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There was even a comment from spez that contained an "A: " at the beginning, proving that those answers are just copy-pasted. lmao
I’ve been following that non AMA for a few hours, and it’s been a bloodbath. Spez really needed to hire a PR team because that was a clown show of epic proportions.
He was caught copy/pasting the softball answers he’d been giving too! He accidentally copied the “A:” in front of one. 😂
General failure answering question A:
Abort, retry, ignore?
