Shower Thoughts

you left reddit because 3rd party apps were being killed off.

I left reddit because reddit sucks and I've been looking for an alternative for a long while now.

We are not the same.

People are not moving over here for convenience, it's new young software with many flaws and missing features. I think most of us are just looking for a brighter future of social networks, one not dictated by a megacorporation and instead segmented more under our individual control. It's impossible for this to match reddit in everything since that's a company with thousands of employees and a 10 year headstart, but perfect shouldn't be an enemy of good.

To be fair, kbin on a mobile browser is already leagues above the official reddit app

To me, I loved using Relay for Reddit, but them killing the 3rd party apps in itself wasn't why I left. The whole situation just showed that Reddit doesn't care about the community, they just care about profit, and they'll happily shaft the users and prominent members of the community.

I don't think most people left solely because of 3rd party apps being killed. I think they left because of the loss of trust that move and the subsequent negative PR created.

It's natural people are looking for something new, even though the quality of life is lower for now. Some things are more important than convenience.

Edit: I forgot to answer the question. No, I don't think it's ironic. I think it's telling.

He'll, I typically used the reddit app rather than 3rd party, but they're doing too much shady-ass shit, and have been for too long (mainly thinking of the mod situation and how a few mods control a vast amount of content without seemingly any oversight). It's weird over here, but it reminds me of when I joined reddit more than 10 years ago now, it's got that vibe, ya know?

I also find it interesting that lack of mod tools is a big complaint of reddit but it seems that lack of mod tools is immediately an issue on kbin/lemmy.

But the decisions made on one vs the other are moving in the opposite directions.

This is a new town, not a razed town.

Browsing on mobile without being asked to log into the app every 10 seconds is already a huge improvement for me.

There's a difference between "actively killing" and "actively developing" third party apps.

You look to the future, not the past or present

While technically correct, I left reddit because the API pricing was more of less the last straw in a long list of issues Reddit has had. It was more of a sign of things to come. This is basically what happened with Digg and why people jumped to reddit.

At least the alternatives come with functional and decent mobile websites.

Well browsing this on a simple browser isn't that bad. Miles better than trying to browse Reddit on a mobile browser.

It’s not about the 3rd party apps, it’s about sending a message.jpg

We aren’t here because this is a better experience. It clearly is not. Reddit has had years of polishing and 3rd party development to make the user experience what it was. Here there’s server crashes, little content, interesting UI choices, and no real idea if this one is going to ‘win’ over some of the other alternatives.

But Reddit killing 3rd party apps is too heavy handed, and people don’t like that. We don’t want to see ads. I’d rather go outside than subject myself to advertisements. We’re bombarded by ads from all directions 24/7 and it’s too much.

Additionally, Reddit will be able to manipulate content and spread propaganda without oversight once they take their users in-house. I’m not interested in being programmed by whoever is invested in the site. This isn’t about ‘3rd party apps’ even though it’s about the apps. This is about leaving a site that is actively going against the users’ best interests on multiple fronts.

There aren't many/any 3pa at the moment, but the admins also didn't recently enact policy changes that are aggressively anti third party, so there's that at least.

Plus the mobile layout is perfectly serviceable on Firefox right now.

It's more than that though.... (I know it's just a showerthought but I'm explaining anyway)

Reddit's mobile experience through the browser is terrible and nearly unusable since it prompts you to download the app when you try to do anything
Reddit's official app is also terrible for a myriad of reasons.
Spez's attitude toward the whole thing really put me off more than anything else

On the other hand:
Kbin and Lemmy both work really well on a mobile browser. An app will be great but it's not necessary to enjoy the site.

The difference is that once a third part app is made for this community I don’t have to worry about some greedy asshole ruining it for profit. I am patient and this community is actually better.

Seems like people aren't noticing that OP is on Kbin. FEDERATION!!!

Robot 0: "There is, no more unethical treatment of the elephants."
Robot 1: "Well there's no more elephants, so..."
Robot 0: "Ah."
Robot 1: "...but still it's good."

0:50 of Robots, by Flight of the Conchords

The real shower thought is that every instance's app/PWA is itself a 3rd party app to the Fediverse

It bears a certain irony, that's true. The difference is that the mobile version of Lemmy already feels like a clean third party app. As a long time RiF user I felt at home right away.

For Vulcan, the strongest impetus to move to kbin was the Snoo Platform's decision to change how API will be accessed, and also Apollo drama.

Vulcan was a Relay user and Relay's dev decision to move into subscription model (can't blame the dev) due to corporate greed of Snoo Platform's execs successfully alienated me from the Snoo Platform.

Well, to be more accurate, the reddit stuff was due to API changes, which would result in fewer 3rd party apps. (and arguably designed for this result).

The kbin API is still a WIP, but it's free to use.

Ah, but there are also no ads and to my knowledge I've yet to see one single bot. For the near future, anyway. Besides, it's not like I'd still have them in a few weeks if I weren't here

There is at least 1 app coming together right now for kbin by /u/hariette - I'm sure it's not the only one.

I didn't even know 3rd party apps exists before this storm lol, and I haven't even seen the decline of Reddit because I'm on it since the end of 2019 😅
But I can see that an alternative is really important.

The thing is, this is a third party app. The platform we're on is the Fediverse, it's just third party apps. No, they don't provide the same thread-like experience that you get on kbin, but for now, there's not much a difference in simply browsing kbin instances from Mastodon apps or the similar. This isn't currently great for kbin.social with all the troubles federating, but explore your options!