Using unmodified third-party Reddit apps with a custom server | Hacker News Reader

Using unmodified third-party Reddit apps with a custom server

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90 pointstech234a22 comments

If we never fell for this awful "API" concept in the first place, we would've never gotten into this situation where discrimination based on user agents and companies effectively mandating what user agent (and by extension, the rest of your hardware and software stack) you can use to access their sites is normalised and even widely accepted.

I wasn't convinced and said this when sites first started promoting and offering "APIs" like it was a new feature, and it's worth repeating again: Every site already has an API and it's 100% free (unless you already needed to pay to get access): HTTP and HTML. Why would I need to register again an "app" (or even register at all if the site is already publicly viewable), and perhaps even pay --- just for the privilege of getting tracked and restricted even more, and to be able to get JSON instead? Fuck that shit.

More frustratingly, people calling things "private API" as if the client for it wasn't something that every visitor to the site would've automatically downloaded and executed. Anything that gets sent to and runs on my machine is fair game for me to read.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

Reminds me of the API that WordPress used for the Blogger-to-WordPress importer way back in the day: replace your Blogger template with a given format that the import script could parse. One of my earliest contributions to open source was an improvement to the format and importer that extended the functionality to bring Blogger comments into WP. Fond memory of the friends I made in the comments of my Blogger site, and the software career that followed.

Scraping doesn’t come with any backwards compatibility. Most APIs do.

> A request for third-party app developers

> Before shutting down your apps, please consider pushing a simple app update to enable specifying a custom client ID and Reddit API domain, as this would greatly simplify setup for allowing users to connect to real Reddit with a custom client ID or to connect to a custom Reddit server.

I wonder why I haven’t seen mention of this anywhere. It’s not clear how open reddit will be with distributing keys, but can’t hurt to try.

That’s sort of skirting around the rules and I won’t be surprised if Reddit simply starts requiring manual approval for API usage which will kill this workaround.

They already do require manual approval. You have to submit a support ticket before generated tokens will work.

That’s only for “production” apps. You can do the development and testing without approval and based on my past experience, for a single user, that’s sufficient as I don’t remember being throttled during my testing. For individual user, I think the limit is fairly high before which they throttle.

Shutting it down from Reddit’s end won’t work here. Reddit open sourced their server code a while back, and this would allow people to point now-banned reddit clients at third party servers running an open source reddit fork from 2017.

The main change from then, according to TFA, is the new UI, but you still get the equivalent of old.reddit.com if you move your subreddit to this (and your members would then be able to use third party clients, assuming this proposal succeeds).

I thought they could band together and collaborate on a non-profit reddit-like backend and all point their apps to the new backend on June 30th. Maybe more going on behind the scenes, but they all seem to just be waiving the flag and shutting down.

I thought the same, but I guess in the end Reddit’s value is in its community and besides the lack of users, a new server like that would need to setup a new business model to sustain itself.

Besides, the third party app devs are often solo devs, right? I don’t think they have the skills, time and resources to do that in a coordinated way.

But I hope in the future something fills the void Reddit has just created.

I was hoping if a committee of the apps could form they could go the non-profit route and continue monetize for profit from their respective frontends. The app third party app devs don't seem to understand value of the user base they have accumulated. This may be the last viable chance for a reddit successor to form.

This uses a 2017 fork of reddit’s server that reddit open sourced. The backend wouldn’t be reddit-like. It would actually be reddit, pre-new UI.

I was wondering why no one has proposed a p2p cache of Reddit yet. Something like this could serve as a bridge to existing clients.

This, right here. Scrape reddit's html and generate a p2p backend store, maybe a decentralized crdt database. Create a clone of reddit's api and provide a new endpoint for apps. Add additional features -- like edit and deletion history -- and everyone is in business again just the same as before.

This is cool. Now someone needs to modify the custom reddit server to proxy requests to the real reddit server. That way users could use personal API keys to still access reddit from Apollo.

Or, support a different system because Reddit is not your friend.

Not for the API reason at all I have my own protest and limiting Reddit usage plans.

Or build your own proxy that uses whatever private API the official app uses?

Seems like the perfect solution if you want to keep using Reddit with your own choice of app.

Yes! Finally someone mentioning adversarial interoperability - the obvious path forward when a company tries to pull the switch part of bait-and-switch.

Maintained and versioned APIs are a convenience, but not a hard requirement. Especially in this day and age of continuous software updates.

It lists not having “New Reddit” as a con, but I see that as a plus. It’s super slow and has worse UX even though it looks better.

I listed it as an omission, not a con :)

I wonder how can you even think about doing an IPO after trying so hard to destroy your user base. Reddit has never been perfect, but why corrupting its core values of usability and simplicity? You’re ending up with a product that the board likes and users don’t.

When I read the title I thought that it was a Reddit proxy that was offering API endpoints by scraping the HTML version.

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