I'm generally willing to pay for a service (I donate to Open Source Projects I regularly use) because of course there are server costs, development costs, etc. But in this case and after all that Reddit has done to its user base it would be a very bad signal to give them money for it... I like Infinity for reddit and would love to have an Infinity for Lemmy
The other point for me is that reddit has been getting shittier long before the API change. Forcing you to use their crappy app when you just clicked a link on mobile, all this weird avatar and award stuff. The weird chat that got bolted onto their message system, yet keeping the two seperate?
There's no way I will pay for that.
Did you know, there’s actually 3? PM, Chat and Legacy Chat… whatever the heck differentiates the last two is frankly beyond me, a 12+ yrs old Reddit user…
And even with that subscription, you still get locked out of any post or subreddit that is marked NSFW, which will now be even more since subreddits are still protesting the changes.
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Ever since the first pricing announcement, they said they’d lock out NSFW. Originally they said it would just be porn, but when asked how the API would differentiate different types of NSFW Reddit never replied.
When mods using 3PA asked how they were supposed to remove NSFW posts on non-NSFW subreddits, the Reddit reply was the posters shouldn’t be doing that. Yeah.
Yup.
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Free speech absolutist except for boobies.
Yes and they're already blocking mobile web access to most porn subreddit. Only from their app, for "safety" 😉
cross section of "IfR" users and people willing to subscribe monthly is rather small
Absolutely. I used Infinity for years now because it's open source and on F-Droid. I used it to get away from Google and the Reddit App. Donating for Infinity's developer? Sure thing. Paying money only to finance reddits API policy? For sure not.
It's 'adapt or die' at the moment for 3rd party Reddit apps. I was kind of hoping that the developer would pivot to Lemmy or add Lemmy functionality to the app. Infinity was my go-to app before the apocalypse.
Same, and that's why I really am disappointed. But hey, someone else is apparently trying to make an "Infinity for Reddit" inspired app for Lemmy. It's apparently going to be called "Beyond". Hopefully, "Beyond for Lemmy". 😉
I think they're trying to get rid of rfd party apps. It's more 'die or die' for them.
I personally wouldn't try to work with Reddit, if I were a developer, but another factor here is that walking away from a project might be a big risk for someone who doesn't have a backup plan. Christian Selig is a high-profile figure who can afford to walk away from a project. He will be able to rebuild his career quickly and easily, and he knows it. The developer of Infinity likely doesn't have as many opportunities, and may also not feel comfortable taking that risk. I don't know much about her, but if she's not making a whole lot as is, she may legitimately not be able to afford going without an income source for weeks or months. It may be less about making a profit by doing this than about avoiding a catastrophic loss. Selig has admitted he's going to be losing a six-figure amount of money ($250,000, iirc) from shutting down after selling year-long subscriptions. I suspect everyone who has or had a Reddit app looking for alternative income sources, but I don't blame her for trying to make Infinity work for a little while longer.
I guess if the app is done and basically works then you might as well add a payment system and at least try to cut your losses. I'd struggle to enthusiastically improve the app after that though.
That comment about "it might not work" really sums up reddit's attitude
I think "struggle to enthusiastically improve the app" is probably an understatement, lol. I doubt this is meant to be a long-term business strategy. It's not like there were any good options here, just her choice of a few bad ones. I wish her luck.
I would consider paying, but giving money to support Reddit? With its current attitude? It is a moral choice rather than a financial one.
Unpopular opinion, but I'd consider it if the API provided all the data. I never expected the API to always continue to be free. But making me pay and providing incomplete data? Nah.
That, or Christian made a pretty expensive mistake...
I wouldn't put a lot pass /u/spez, including offering special deals on API pricing. Especially if he thinks it would make Christian Selig look bad.
It's precisely the kind of thing a lying, gaslighting and vindictive /u/spez would do.
You know what... That does seem like something Spez would do.
This is reddit killing third party apps, because even if you did subscribe you're still not getting NSFW because reddit is taking that out of the API anyways
So who would pay literally more for less? Reddit can say all they want about supporting 3rd party but even the blind could see through them
I think the best thing to do if you want to continue using Infinity would be to just compile your own APK with your own API key.
I've never used android studio before but didnt take me very long to work out how, and it all seems to be working.
You only need to change a couple of settings and about 3 lines of code.
You don't even need android studio. You can edit the files with anything and just compile the apk with any valid android compiler. But yeah it ain't that hard. The question remains: do you want to be using reddit? ;)
Someone made a Google collab notebook that takes your API keys as an input, takes care of the compilation and offers you a download link to get your apk. Zero knowledge needed!
It's 100% clear that Reddit is trying to kill off third party apps completely so that they can facefuck you with ads and other garbage. The Apollo dev saw the writing on the wall. I can't blame other app devs for trying to squeeze a bit more livelihood out of this, but hopefully they've realized that they need to move on asap. In the end, it's a great reminder to not build your business on someone else's platform, even if they're "cool".
Reddit should be paying users, not the other way around.
Also didn't reddit already make enough money to cover its server costs several times over selling gold and premium? The only reason it isn't turning a profit is because of excessive management costs.
Christian already had paid subscriptions he'd have to contend with. A much harder problem.
Apollo users tends to browse and interact with Reddit more than other platforms, too, so the per user cost is much higher.
Yeah I've used Infinity for over two years, but won't after this update. I couldn't imagine paying money to Infinity only to have it go directly to Reddit. Tbh, I don't think paying money to any non-open, profit-driven social network is a good idea.
I love infinity but paying for Reddit to enable them to continue doing this is something I hope nobody does.
Infinity for Reddit is OpenSource: https://github.com/Docile-Alligator/Infinity-For-Reddit
Apparently Reddit doesn't allow the original developer to publish the app with a field for a user API key... but there are tutorials on what to modify to get it to work, and there might be forks out there with the required fields baked in.
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Are there price details yet? Christian was talking about $5 still not breaking even so I’d be interested to see where they’ve landed.
I don't think there's any way you could economically run a 3rd party app with the new API pricing. When the Apollo developer did the math it looked very sensible, and IMHO there's a huge downside to miscalculating the pricing (eg. underestimating the API usage of power users). I wish them luck, but this is probably going to end up pushing this developer into a financial hole, even discounting the extra dev work needed.
I read that it should be between 10-15 dollars. It's way too expensive, it's a shame.
You should never pay for for-profit social media, it's fundamentally backwards. Their service is not the product, your contributions and presence are. They are nothing without you, and require you.
The exception is things like instances on the Fedi where it's not for profit and you're putting up a server to include yourself.
There's no way to be profitable with this pricing. Simply no way. Each time an user opens the app it will cost 2 cents in API requests. Continue scrolling, open threads and the costs rises. In average, accounting all the lurkers, inactive and free users, it might look like that it could be supported by a $2 subscription. But then, who is willing to subscribe to an app to read a free website? Only the most addicted users. The ones that will doom scroll for hours. The ones that will do 10000 api requests per day
Also, the server backend must be rewritten from scratch. Right now the app is open source and it's talking directly to the reddit servers using the API key. After the change, it could continue to do so, but because extracting the API key from the APK is trivial, some asshole could extract/crack it and give her a massive bill
Every single request must be proxied by her own server, making a check for a valid subscription to each user and also some quota management. Possibly some caching to save money on the most popular posts. Otherwise it will be trivial for some asshole to make a revanced patch to bypass the subscription. But implement this takes months, she can't have done this and tested carefully in just two weeks
Please someone let her realize this before she gets a massive bill at the end of the month, i don't have a reddit account for that
I wonder if there will be apps similar to NewPipe for YouTube or Frost for Facebook that don't rely on official third party APIs.
While I'm happy on Lemmy, it seems that reddit has so far won the battle and protest died down.
Subscription with less features (no nsfw). That's a no from me. I will not be using reddit on mobile.
And what you're going to find too is that as the sub price goes up, the users who use it the least (generating less API costs) get priced out first. In other words, the average cost per user increases because the users who are willing to pay more are the ones who are generating more costs. If 75% of users stop using it because of the subscription cost, the API costs won't fall by anywhere close to 75%.
I mean what's the point. This is all just going to pay Reddit for the privilege of a hobbled 3rd-party app experience (and no NSFW). And we now know how much Reddit cares about you using their API.
Even with subscription how many requests you're allowed per month?
You honestly can't blame them for trying to adapt and keep their project going. It's either they start doing a subscription model or Infinity dies. They aren't allowed to make a tutorial for you to just replace their API key with your own, so what choice do they have? (you can do that btw, there are tutorials on the Infinity subreddit, although you're limited to 100 calls a day)
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