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

23 points by m1sta_ ↗ HN
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.

10 comments

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predictabl3
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.

incogitor
I can't find reference to this, would you mind sharing a link? I'm interested as a potential contributor.
predictabl3
Heh, I suspect it was posted to a sub that has now gone dark because I can't find it.

To help search, the acronym was something like "API formerly known as..." And then ended with RS because .

If I find it again I'll post another new reply to you.

yonatan8070
I found this https://github.com/derivator/tafkars
predictabl3
This was certainly it.

Also, I don't know about the legality/ethics of it, but it would be really cool to see Reddit Moderators work with someone to mirror reddit submissions to Lemmy. At the very least it would promote further discussion of who owns the content of reddit.com, as curated entirely by volunteer mods.

midoridensha
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.

pillefitz
Developers could collaborate on some middleware/proxy that does the mapping
gregman1
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.
Raed667
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.