I hardly use the site and I just tried making an account to ask a question on a hobby subReddit.
The site is plagued by errors, every five seconds “We had a server error”
Any time I tried to post “You post was automatically removed” no explanation. And this isn’t a “you posted something against the rules” kind of thing because the posts I was trying to make were the same as the one other people were making on the sub. Half the time even when I tried to comment on a post the “server encounted an error”.
Not to mention the site blocks you if you try to use a VPN.
Is it because I’m using mobile Firefox? Who cares? If Lemmy can function fine on a mobile browser, Reddit, one of the most famous and popular social media platforms on the internet can.
So I deleted my account. Why bother having a Reddit account if you can’t even use it? I know complaining about Reddit is cringe and overdone, but damn I had no idea how far the site had fallen.
I swear these popular sites are trying to destroy themselves. There is no logical reason they should be this broken. It’s almost like these corporations are purposely trying to break the internet.
It’s slightly less unusable with old.reddit.com which gives you a previous, less enshittified, UI. It is definitely even worse on mobile because it tries really hard to push you onto their shitty app
This site is also broken
One of the things I love about Hexbear is that it works fantastically under Firefox on Android. It loads fast and it loads with a great layout. It’s obvious that whoever is maintaining the layout code is testing against mobile Firefox, and if anyone reading this is involved in that testing, I really appreciate your work.
I deleted my last Reddit account a few weeks ago. I kept it around that long because there’s a surprisingly useful and active and non-chuddish subreddit for my home city. But I decided to just bite the bullet and stop going there.
Haven’t used reddit in years now. In the rare event I want to view a reddit page, I run the old.reddit.com page through an archive service since it blocks my VPN.
Has anyone seen the Mastodon server bird.makeup? It basically proxies Twitter accounts and rehosts them as Mastodon accounts. Is there anything like that for reddit and Lemmy?
edit: project source code. Also supports instagram at: kilogram.makeup. Apparently, reddit support is being worked on.
Has anyone seen the Mastodon server bird.makeup? It basically proxies Twitter accounts and rehosts them as Mastodon accounts.
thanks
i hate it
In practice, it’s not so bad. It basically exists so you boost twitter posts without doing the whole screenshot copy-paste rigamarole (and so people can tell it’s legit and not just a fake screenshot). Occasionally I’ll see somebody boost some Adam Johnson or Jeet Heer tweet on Masto and it is because of bird.makeup. In my experience it does a pretty poor job of keeping in sync though. A lot of accounts only show old tweets.
I feel like this is different for Twitter and Reddit though. Mirroring twitter kind of makes sense. You don’t see anything unless you follow an account (opt in), and you can boost a meaningful tweet and it’s not particularly obnoxious. Having hundreds of RedditGPT ass communities floating around making tens of thousands of automated comments and hundreds of thousands of automated votes that we can’t even comment in would be obnoxious as hell. It might make sense if the communities could be bridged, but Reddit will never develop the APIs to make that possible. As long as Reddit is read-only, it makes more sense just to link to a libreddit instance.
This wouldn’t be annoying if well implemented IMO.
If bridge servers could configure:
- source whitelist / blacklist (subreddits, users, etc.)
- post content types to mirror (links, images, text posts, comments, etc.)
- vote behavior (ignore votes from reddit, lemmy, or both)
- fetch behavior (federated servers, cache advertisement, polling frequency, comment thread max depth, etc.)
we could either federate with a bridge configured to our liking or run our own instance.
Example ideas:
- mirror only the decent Marxist subs from reddit.
- mirror some lib subs for posting bridge links to /c/the_dunk_tank instead of screenshots or the reddit link, which would be better for privacy & opsec and allow us to comment and rebuke BS or dunk without interacting with reddit.
I had a discussion with an irl friend about the various proxy frontend servers (nitter, libreddit, etc.) and how the cat-and-mouse game of blocking / rate limiting makes them unreliable and annoying to use. We discussed the idea of frontends federating their cached content with one another, where queries to the frontend would check other federated servers for the cached content before trying the official API, making it easier for proxies to avoid getting rate limited and preventing rate limiting and breaking API changes from blocking access to content already cached.
Direct ActivityPub integration is basically that, but with a bunch of added benefits:
- interaction with the content
- access the content with the same (open source) client they use for the fediverse
- access more content than their proprietary counterparts, making the fediverse more appealing to normies who just want to laugh at memes
- display links posted to both Lemmy and reddit as crossposts, so users could browse by local / subscribed, but also see the reddit comment section if they desire
In practice, it’s not so bad. It basically exists so you boost twitter posts without doing the whole screenshot copy-paste rigamarole (and so people can tell it’s legit and not just a fake screenshot). Occasionally I’ll see somebody boost some Adam Johnson or Jeet Heer tweet on Masto and it is because of bird.makeup. In my experience it does a pretty poor job of keeping in sync though. A lot of accounts only show old tweets.
yeah bridges are pretty neat
I feel like this is different for Twitter and Reddit though. Mirroring twitter kind of makes sense. You don’t see anything unless you follow an account (opt in), and you can boost a meaningful tweet and it’s not particularly obnoxious. Having hundreds of RedditGPT ass communities floating around making tens of thousands of automated comments and hundreds of thousands of automated votes that we can’t even comment in would be obnoxious as hell,
god bless that ever happens lol. never
In reddit’s case I’m cheering it on. Fuuuck that website. Youtube’s enshittification bothers me more because it’s even more of a monolith on the video-hosting landscape, and there’s a ton of useful tutorial content on there for such a wide variety of subjects.
I wish videos weren’t the way forward for short tutorials and fixes. This could have been 2 sentences and an image with a red circle. Aaargh
Yeah, true. There are so many cases where I have an issue where I literally just need a yes or no answer, or to learn a simple keyboard shortcut in a program, but instead I end up having to watch a whole video. Part of that is search engines being so terrible now.
My most recent one was “how to do a fillet in Blender”. The answer is select am edge, press ctrl-b to activate the bevel tool, scroll up.
4 minutes into a six minute video
