from Hacker News

Ask HN: Pecedent for all Reddit 3rd party apps redirecting to a competitor?

by m1sta_ on 6/12/23, 11:31 PM with 9 comments

There are a few decent Reddit competitors out there. If all of the services impacted by the Reddit API changes switched to supporting a new singular alternative we might see enough traffic movement for something real to permanently result.

  • by predictabl3 on 6/13/23, 1:33 AM

    Someone's developing a reddit API "proxy" that is backed by the Fediverse. Seems like the best option I've heard of.

    AFKARS, is the name, if I recall the amusing acronym correctly.

  • by gregman1 on 6/13/23, 5:49 AM

    I asked Christian (Apollo) about it and he decided to ignore that question. It would be cool to have an open source “plugin” for Apollo to translate, for example, lemmy to Apollo’s internal API. I expect it to boost lemmy development as well.

  • by Raed667 on 6/13/23, 8:35 AM

    What i like about reddit is the content, that would be very hard to "redirect" without cloning entire subreddits history.

    Not very sure about the ethics or technical feasibility of that.

  • by midoridensha on 6/13/23, 4:54 AM

    Sounds great, but these 3rd-party apps are designed to use the Reddit API, so I don't see how they could be made to quickly use any other service unless they just throw up a big banner saying "We can't use Reddit any more because they've closed their API to us, so we recommend you try out $service instead! Sorry, but this app isn't written for $service's API, so you'll just have to navigate there with your web browser."

    It would probably take a fair amount of time to make new versions of these apps for a different service's API.