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Comment by wing-_-nuts | Hacker News Reader

What gets me is if all the third party apps had banded together and said 'july 1st, we all pivoting to support a new platform', that would have been enough of a network effect to effectively cold start the network effect on whatever they targeted. It would have been dig all over again, and this time reddit would have been in the dust bin.

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The coordination required for such would be quite intense. Also fragile, as the third party apps would quickly abandon any roadmap agreed upon if Reddit changed its mind.

Maybe it can happen now among the apps that have put their foot down about a complete end, but certainly loses a lot of momentum from those who might have already uninstalled them.

Isn't this basically how Reddit got popular, when everyone was mad about Digg's UI update so they wanted an alternative?

This is something I've been investigating. If one had a gateway that spoke Reddit's API, the apps wouldn't even really have to pivot, just change the API base URL.

And in theory not even that. As long as the traffic can be redirected to a different server it should still work. In practice, however, at least Apollo has some server-side components so it wouldn't be totally plug-and-play without developer support.

Sadly, I'm not sure how to get in touch with the developers/users who may be interested.

(I've also heard that someone's working on a Reddit/Lemmy gateway, but I don't know who they are or how far they've gotten.)

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