📣 Apollo will close down on June 30th. Reddit’s recent decisions and actions have unfortunately made it impossible for Apollo to continue. Thank you so, so much for all the support over the years. ❤️
I literally just signed up for lemmy after reading this post on reddit. I’m ready for reddit to crash. Decentralized apps seem like the way to go. It seems super short-sighted on Reddit’s part to be basically extorting all these 3rd party apps that are super popular.
Unfortunately, I doubt Reddit would crash. I don't think these online protests have much sway anymore. Twitter's definitely didn't. And ironically, Lemmy might crash a couple times with going over user capacity...
Either way, we ought to work to avoid it. Chop chop, people, content, we need content! Lifeblood of link aggregators is people having topics.
I think the thought of major subs going private out of protest has them at least a little worried. Worried enough to try to backtrack on the changes that will affect moderators to "give them more time", but only if they don't participate in the blackout.
Sounds a lot like threatening at this point (and who knows if they'll follow through with their promises if even one sub goes dark), which ironically is the same thing they accused the Apollo dev of doing to the Reddit team.
I don't know... 50% of their top advertisers have left, and their advertising income is down 60%. I'm no longer there, so I can't speak to overall user engagement, but with their revenue cratering, I'm not sure how long it is destined for this world.
The thing about social media sites is that they never truly and permanently die, they just slowly languish into irrelevance.
MySpace still exists for example, as does AOL, Tumblr, and yes, DIGG.. However to say they are shells of their former selves would be an understatement.
It took 5 years after Facebook opened up to the general punic for MySpace to fall to the point of having to sell out to another company. We are still in the early days when it comes to seeing if Musk will effectively kill Twitter.
If reddit starts to die we won't notice for quite some time. We will at most see waves of people leaving months or years apart and then one day reddit will just find itself basically forgotten about.
There is a thing, twitter has already had an okay and quite usable official app alongside third party apps. Reddit official app is buggy as hell and not very intuitive. I think too Reddit will survive, but I think the quality of content is going to go down since many power users were using third party apps.
But for Reddit officials that wouldn’t be a problem since they don’t care for quality but for engagement.
Honestly the rough parts remind me of the good old days of the internet. I'm no gatekeeper but I'm happy when sites are smaller, focused, and slow to grow.
Indeed it is. All I really want is a place where I can intellectually engage with people in good faith, even when people disagree with me; finding it productive, fun and maybe learning a thing or two. Constantly being called a "bigot," "fascist," "asshole," "idiot," "moron," really leaves it wanting.
I'm one of those that nuked my Reddit account too... Was a Boost user for many, many years. Tens of thousands of contributions in the way of posts and comments and this move by them was the straw that broke the camel. The place is a shell of what it was in the early days sadly. Year by year it's seemingly declined.
I'm done with it and moving on to pastures a new :)
It's the curse of VC funding. Companies love the cash injection, but it inevitably is followed by the demand to quadruple revenue and extract every ounce of capital out of the product. VCs destroy good products for capital. I'm glad to have discovered Lemmy and I hope the general Fediverse world of web applications continues to spread and get more of a foothold. It's way better for users in the end.
is facebookification a word? I am so sad to see this happen as a long time user of Reddit, been on there for...god, 11 years according to my profile awards. I see a lot of people saying this is the end of Reddit but I have to disagree, it is more like a new age. Reddit will now only be used by people who are fine with getting absolutely fucked with ads and close to nil moderation. I imagine it will be a husk of what it once was - it'll look the same but I'm sure it will just be repost land. It wasn't hard to see this coming, but I can't help but feel a sadness.
With the Fediverse slowly gaining steam, I've been thinking a lot about the structural problems with the big social media platforms of old. I really feel like we set ourselves up for this outcome. Of course Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit were going to let us down sooner or later. We placed our trust in private centralized companies to stay good on their ethics. The moment money even entered the discourse in those spaces, they were doomed to become what they are now. I really hope Lemmy and Mastodon and Frendica and Peertube and the other Fediverse platforms can gain popularity. We have a real chance here to build social media from the ground up, but this time with the long term ethics in mind. I really think this decentralized structure can allow us to keep more transparency and allow for smaller feeling communities to thrive without being subject to tyrannical administration.
Edit: Corrected "momey" to "money". Really sounded like a weird fetish there, I am sorry. Momey is not entering the discourse in any spaces, thank you very much.
Any time I talk about decentralized apps to friends and family I come across as some kind of conspiracy driven weirdo. I do not understand why decentralization comes across as some kind of extreme radical movement. I'm not protesting or anything, everything else just sucks lol
@Acester47@dylan, Reddit by default send userdata to Alphabet (Google), Amazon, ComScore and TowerData (known to use even keylogging to profile users). That is, what you write on Reddit is known by most advertising companies, along with your account data. Enshittification is falling short.
Most typical users have no idea what Apollo is, and I imagine most of the engagement is still from the mobile site with the official app taking the next biggest piece of the pie. Anyone commenting on this site now is in a very specific tech bubble.
Anyone commenting on this site now is in a very specific tech bubble.
And it may be better that it ends up this way. Tech people at least in my experience, tend to be more balanced and level headed discussing topics outside of tech, than people who are single-issue, obsessed with other topics.
I'm not too surprised that Reddit would go so far as to lie about somebody blackmailing them. This is a disgusting thing to do to someone who's bringing people to your website.
I have over a decade on Reddit across several accounts and if I can't use Sync on Android or Apollo on iOS then I just wont even browse on mobile. They already killed i.reddit and compact, their browser experience is intentionally shit to try and get you to install their app.
If the day ever comes that old.reddit is shut down I will overwrite all of my comments and delete my account
Seriously. They've released the backend code, why not release the frontend too? Open-source is definitely viable, if the developer just lets the project rot, they'll get nothing from it, but if they just slap the GPL on it and work with the community on a fork, then they would end up leading a nice open-source project. I'd love to see Lemmy gaining a bunch of users too; that's definitely be nice.
I think this is the end for reddit maybe after june 30th apollo users will be slowly migrate to official reddit app or another platform. This event will generate massive traffic for lemmy. The great thing about reddit is before the API rules reddit is called as mini internet. Everyone shared most valuable content and mods maintained the communities from spam their work is most valuable thing and thank you for all your work.
I think more people are going to quit Reddit than migrate to anything else. Apollo is such an ingrained experience for iOS users that anything else wouldn’t be worth it.
Hey, i just want to say that i really appreciate everything you're doing. Tons of awesome work.
And i know I'm not alone.
Where should i donate? Either time or money or both? Server costs, app dev costs(i know you also develop jerboa), etc.
But really i just wanted to say thank you. We all really appreciate your efforts. I know it's gotta be overwhelming at the moment so it's nice to just hear that once in a while. You're very much appreciated.
I’ve been a Reddit user for many years. It was a great run but I’m moving here. For now I’m missing quit a few favorite communities but that should improve with time.
If there is even small scale organized move to Lemmy with the best mods and content posters, there won’t be much to worry about. I’d be more worried about moving too fast and destroying the servers/network effect accelerating with the influx of meme spam. You see what happened to just about every large subreddit becoming a low quality content cesspool perpetuated by the hive mind. I love Reddit but it’s hard to watch communities need to migrate to niche or private subreddits.
Right now I think everyone agrees there is no rea Reddit substitute, so Lemmy is the main landing spot. So long as we don’t get bored here conversing with a smaller population, Reddit doesn’t do a complete about face, and Lenny’s servers don’t crash and burn - I think time will help work things out.
ReddPlanet dev came to the same decision. Gutted tbh. After more than 13 years I'm done for good with that place. Shoutout to all the 3rd party devs. You deserve better, and I hope you find success with any new project you might launch in the future.
Remember when in September 2017, Reddit decided to no longer be open-source? Well it was precisely to prepare for this specific scenario. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish and we're finally on step 3.
My wife uses reddit, and couldn't be bothered to use anything other than the official app. Sadly she's in the majority with this. I'd say somewhere between 5-20% of mobile only/heavy reddit users will end up over here, and that's heavily dependent on whether or not the subreddits that they like come over here too. I see far too much content for the moment just linking back to reddit
The question is: Are users like your wife submitting popular content, or are they mostly consumers? If nobody submits good content, there is nothing to consume.
The stats assume all users contribute the same amount to the community.
Like you've said, if a large number of the people who submit content are the ones using the third party apps then the loss of those users has a large larger impact.
The same thing applies to moderators who use third party apps (among other tools that may not be affected) because their mod tools are better than the official app.
A lot of Reddit mods rely on third party apps though, as the modding tools in the native app are garbage. I foresee another exodus of users as the modding quality declines and subs start turning into dumpster fires of spam
this is the key. it doesnt really matter how many regular users rely on 3rd party apps, when the percentage of mods that use them is considerably higher. (In fact I would guess if 5% of regular users use 3rd party apps, probably 5% of mods use official reddit app)
and without the free help that reddit have relied on for years, the place falls apart.
The more I dive the worse it smells. Willing to bet this situation would be less worse if they just came out and said "Alright guys sorry but we're banning 3rd party apps", instead they make more and more lies
I suspect the reason they did that is that it might leave them open to anti-trust action. But if the price is just too high? Oh well, guess them's the breaks.
The decline of Reddit is a great shame. But the model of social media companies needing to IPO and make profit always hurts users in the long run. When Reddit do IPO more decisions will be made that make the experience worse for users simply because the interests of the platform owners will no longer be aligned with the interests of the users. We can’t know how things will work out but at least the fediverse model is new and is theoretically more sustainable.
Has there been any official rationale for this? It seems like a waste. It can't be that hard to do, and while the fediverse may not be huge yet, most of its users are the type of power users it would clearly appeal to.
The next couple of weeks are going to be ROUGH here. New instances spinning up, and existing ones grinding to a halt under the weight of new users. This is going to be a hell of a stress test.
But it should also make this space truly viable for users. We should expect more people to bounce than to stay, but it's starting to look like we've already crossed a critical threshold for sustainability.
I'd rather the growth here be much more organic and discovery driven, than by a mass exodus of users from another platform all rushing in. Mobile app's were 'far' from being the only reason to leave Reddit.
I expect it to be similar to Mastodon but perhaps not quite as big. That said, that service has flexed pretty well thanks to the tireless efforts of many instance maintainers. Hopefully a similar passion and level of support emerges here.
Yeah. Lemmy doesn't need to be Reddit sized by tomorrow. For now we can just enjoy an older style of smaller forum community. All we can do is keep popping in to Reddit and letting people know about Lemmy. Keep helping people understand the decentralized structure. Keep fostering a welcoming and engaging community. Eventually we'll grow and I truly suspect we can outpace Reddit. It might be years or even a decade before that happens, but I believe it will happen as long as we keep this community active and growing.
Makes literally no sense to me that Reddit couldn't afford to provide a price exception to 3rd party apps that have helped grow their community and website over the years. I've been using Reddit Is Fun for almost a decade now, and I'm not switching to their official app.
Companies are getting too comfortable when they have no competition. Really hope a Fediverse alternative will kick off like Mastodon did (ironically I'm placing my bets on kbin even though I use Lemmy. Seems like the simpler alternative that'll be easier to invite people over).
I've never had an issue with the main app or site myself, and have been on Reddit for like 15+ years now? Fuckin forever IDK. I'm still down to bail for Lemmy, I support everyone who finds use in 3rd party apps plus I'm tired of bonkers bans and power hungry mods while ridiculous shit gets left up as A-OK.
I'm actually on a 7 day ban right now, for "abusing the report feature." The linked report they provided as proof of abuse? A comment they had just messaged me to tell me "We agree this has violated TOS and have removed the violating content."
So........."You're right, that DOES break the rules.......But could you STOP FUCKING MAKING US PRESS TWO BUTTONS ALREADY?!"
You can. Companies do it all the time. Being grandfathered in is why people still pay pences on their cellphone plans from major providers, for example. I don't think it's the answer in this particular scenario, though.
I loved Relay while I was on Android. I'd say it's the best Reddit app on Android. When I switched back to IOS, I was able to customize Apollo to pretty much mimic the UI of Relay's.
Once June 30th rolls around, my reddit usage dies along with Apollo.
I would highly recommend that everyone run a tool like Redact over your reddit accounts. Deprive them of your user contributions if they're going to play this way.
Do those tools rely in any way on pushshift in order to work? If so, I don't know if they'll work now since Reddit cut off pushshift.io's access to the API back in early May.
Kind of disagree... Not that I'm saying don't but I have Q/A for programming things and other topics that's years old. Its already been scrapped, and it is useful for others to find even years later.
Yeah, I briefly flirted with the idea of nuking my account, but before I deleted it I would get a comment once in awhile, on a post/comment from years ago thanking me for solving an issue someone was having. And despite how much I really don't want to continue contributing to reddit's profits, I felt like having that there for someone to stumble on after hours of searching and smashing their face in the keyboard was worth whatever reddit makes off it. Also I had some wicked burns on some fascist shit bags.
I really hope Christian gets through this. Working so hard on an app for years, only to see it get flushed down the toilet because of Reddit's ridiculous pricing and them not budging on it, has to be a nightmare to experience.
I also just signed up for Lemmy because of this announcement. I assume there are going to be at least a small number of people transitioning to Lemmy over the coming weeks. At least if the response from so many that they’re leaving Reddit entirely is anything to go by.
The first one to fall, unfortunately. The conversation the Apollo Dev had with the admins seemed pretty bleak. I'm slowly accepting that Reddit needs to die. As a Redditor, we built it. We can kill it.
Maybe. But it may well be, that Reddit has enough momentum to keep going with the shitload of dummy users who don't care about third party apps or quality.
I feel lots of people say "Who cares about 3rd party apps?" don't realize the mod community also heavily relies on 3rd party apps. So high chance of the quality of subreddits going downhill regardless.
Either way, anyone using Reddit still should be looking for a way off the platform.
For all we know, half the users over there (re)posting content could be bots that continue indefinitely, reposting more and more popular content from other sites like TikTok with more bots leaving comments that they stole from other posts. Reddit could in theory continue operating even with zero actual users.
Mm, I use(d) Slide personally, which is more-or-less abandonware at this point. I expect that'll just get its API user disabled by the dev, so it "doesn't work" any more.
Well, this was exactly the outcome Reddit was aiming for with the exorbitant pricing. They want to force everyone to use their app. I hope it backfires on them.
This is huge, I don't have statistics but surely the most popular third party app.
I really hope reddit is hurt a lot by this move they're doing. It feels like it's probably too late for them to walk it back and that's probably a good thing. As much as I really enjoy a lot of the communities over there, I don't think it's healthy they remain on reddit, they clearly don't have the best interests of their users now, if they ever did. I know they've lost me and a lot of people who are moving over to lemmy, but I do hope a lot more follow and this hurts them.
Just going off of a quick stroll through the iOS app store (as of time of this post)
Apollo is the highest rated 3rd party reddit app at #11 in the News category (for comparison, the next highest was Narwhal at #75 within this same category)
Apollo does not however breach the top 200 apps app-store-wide. The official reddit app does at #52 overall. and enjoys the company of other ubiquitous apps like Hulu, Duolingo, Google Drive, and Disney+, all within 10 ranks of it on the overall list.
It does seem that reddit has crunched their numbers and gambled that 3rd party app users and the uproar they are in is a calculable loss against the groundswell of desktop and official reddit app users.
The one issue with social networks isn't necessarily the raw numbers, but rather what apps to your critical users use? We already know tons of subreddit mods use 3rd party apps for better tools. Power users -- often those more likely to generate content -- are also more likely to use third party tools. General consumers are more likely to use the first-party tool. What happens if there's a dramatic drop in content generation, or subreddits get overrun with spam? The relationship is often complex because the user base isn't homogeneous.
That said, as I get older I realize more and more that just because someone is running a company, it doesn't mean they have any actual qualifications to be there. And this might just be a really surface-level evaluation and understanding on behalf of Reddit.
It's sad to read, but perhaps this will be a reckoning for many of the major platforms. There has been a recent trend among corporate software developers to assume that they can simply replicate what third party contributors do for their platform and they don't appreciate the amount of effort it takes to properly replace. I'm hoping that this helps encourage migrations to open-source platforms like Lemmy.
I wonder if this could be viewed as anti-competitive. Reddit's control over the site gives them leverage to squeeze out others who engage with the userbase.
Others, like the founder of Apollo, are denied access to users by reddit's anti-competitive behavior.
Stop the enshitification! I feel like greed is ruining so many nice things lately. Streaming services, gaming and a lot of social media as well. More costs for more ads and increasingly bad content. First post on Lemmy and will try to advertise it to my friends, lets hope for a better take off than Mastodon!
This is why open platforms like Lemmy, Mastodon and others are so important. We need to stop letting a few large, shitty companies hold everything hostage.
I hope this apps could be migrated to the fediverse alternatives, like Tapbot has done with Tweetbot (now it works with mastodon). They have a lot of work done and it will help to bring and mantain more users to fediverse (I prefer free apps, but the more options to choose, the better)
But the new users can join any lemmy server and still interact with everyone, so ideally the load would be distributed throughout all the instances instead of making one of them overloaded.
Yes but even 40k users per instance requires substantial amount of resources right now to keep things not-stuttering. And Apollo has millions of users. So we’d need 200 new instances as big as the largest ones we already have. And that’s assuming activity pub caching is already ironed out. Idk if it is.
Reddit is all I've known for the past 12 years, this honestly just sucks. Started off with Bacon Reader and then moved to Relay. These apps frankly make Reddit so this is the death of Reddit for me and many others.
I hope Lemmy works out, I think the migration from Reddit to Lemmy (or alternative) is going to be much more difficult than it was from Digg to Reddit. Let's hope it goes as smoothly as possible.
I really, really hope a good amount of developers can convert their apps to work with the Lemmy API. Would be a shame to see all the wonderful work across the 3rd party apps go the way of the dodo :(
I'm honestly so excited reading the comments in this thread. It is insane how much of an impact this app had on the apple community. It was even mentioned during the Apple Vision Pro unveiling at WWDC 2023.
I hope there's another mass exodus like all the users are saying there is going to be. That would be sooo cool.
I don't know if the headings are what people actually said to him or not, but it's very sad to see him beat up about just trusting what people who he's had a fruitful 8 year relationship with say. The blame shouldn't be on him for being positive about what to him, had been a perfectly acceptable long-standing business relationship. The fact that he can eat this cost and said he'll be fine means that he wasn't simply being blind to the realities of the world/