Looks like it’s not going to be just old Reddit anymore

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[–] 5 points 1 day ago (3 children)

I use redlib through the LibRedirect extension to view Reddit these days. My favorite instances are redlib catsarch com (it has great uptime) and r naa gg (I used this during the strange redlib outage a few days ago).

I remember a redlib fork developer mentioning the use of obscura to get around the block, though I'm not sure how they'll scrape when reddit needs a login.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago (2 children)

    I self-host my own Redlib instance, its basically the only way I interact with Reddit these days. The other day they updated the site to break Redlib and I had to apply a fix someone made with AI to keep it working... later there was a human made fix it just took more time. It's going to get harder and harder to maintain instances the more they lock down Reddit. But I guess if Nitter is still working people will keep Redlib working. Nitter has long been much more difficult to self-host. Time to start hoarding throw away accounts, I guess.

    I do sometimes wonder if it does more damage in the long run keep the site usable for some people while Reddit enshitifies itself? I wish people would hurry up and migrate here, its only going to get worse.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago

    Yeah, I bet that's why they made the decision to require logins because the community that wanted to continue using reddit in ways they didn't want them to could adapt to any other changes they made like within hours or minutes. They blocked the app API but their own website still needed a way to access posts and comments and that way could be hijacked by anything else that just pretended to be a normal user or a collection of normal users browsing normally.

    Requiring a login won't stop them. They will need to watermark comments per account in order to map sites that still get around it back to accounts to ban, though even that can be defeated by just using several accounts and comparing the comments to find out what the watermarks are and just strip them out entirely. Then just make sure the accounts that work together don't do it in a consistent and detectable way and I don't know how they would be able to respond to that.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 day ago

    Honestly, the thing that I think will kill Reddit at this point is an AI clone. Stack overflow has been overtaken by AI; it's only a matter of time before a self-hosted AI Reddit with AI bots talking to each other becomes a reality. AI Reddit can scrape Google News for topics to post into its various AI subreddits. And self-hosted AI Reddit can't ban you for upvoting the wrong thing. And besides, Reddit is filled with bots already, so why not go all the way? Very dystopian, yeah?

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