For me I found the new Reddit desktop site completely unusable. I hated everything about it. On desktop I used old.reddit with RES.
On mobile their 1st party app was similarly shitty like their new desktop ui. The 3rd party apps were much better but I didn't necessarily prefer then over the old+RES desktop website.
Main reason I also used mobile apps was that I could browse Reddit while taking a shit.
What is this email you speak of? Is it popular? Surely it can't be that popular if it's a decentralized open protocol and standard.
The fediverse is not a single database or server. It's a protocol and standard that's distributed by design. The fediverse as a whole cannot be centrally monetized, just like email can't be monetized. A single provider could potentially choose to try to monetize either by requiring a subscription or showing ads, exactly like email providers do, but if you ever feel like they've stopped providing a good service you can just switch to another instance just like you can switch to another email provider.
Unlike a centralized service like Reddit, you're not locked into a monopoly. Switching instances does not lock you out of the system as a whole, just like you can still receive email if you switch to another provider. With Reddit you can only access the platform through Reddit because it's a closed source centralized monopoly.
One thing the fediverse seems to lack as far as I can tell is a way to link accounts, like how you can set up forwarding with email, which helps you switch providers. But the protocol and standard is still being developed so maybe that's something that can happen in the future
But there are so many ways Reddit could have played this better. It wasn't just about monetizing. The API changes were in bad faith and meant to kill 3rd party apps without flat out doing it. Users would have been understanding if they charged a reasonable amount of started injecting ads into the API feeds, but instead they went full aggro and disrespected not just the devs working to make their platform better, but the users as well. If they wanted 3rd party apps to show their ads or charge a fee to remove ads I would have been understanding, but because of the disrespect I've dropped them.
It goes deeper than that.
This all started with the API changes. Before they were charging a fair price for the API and companies happily paid it for the convenience. Then Elon got greedy he started charging a ridiculous amount for the API so those companies decided it would be worth it to just deal with the annoyance and switch to scraping the website instead. But when you hit the website it's way less efficient than hitting the API because it's doing a bunch of mixing and ranking which is a lot more complicated and costly than serving static content, which costs a small fraction of real time algorithmic ranking. So now instead of making money off companies that want their data they're losing money on the cloud costs to serve the scrapers.
More recently, they haven't been paying their hosting bills to Google and their service was set to expire at the end of last month. What just happened at the start of this month? They added the limitations. That can't be a coincidence. Now the Google services weren't hosting the site itself, otherwise they'd probably be fully down right now, but it was hosting their trust and safety services for things like fighting spam. That could have also been hosting anti scraper services as well. Since they're so under staffed they probably couldn't swap the services in time, so instead of having anti scraping services like every other big company on the internet, they decided to cut service instead. It's just built up incompetence coming to a head.
They're not just mentioning Lemmy they're making a new app for it!
"see? Despite limiting access we actually gained users"
Reading posts? 600 would go by very quickly and 6000 could be scrolled through by a power user pretty easily which sucks for a paid account.
Before Reddit there was digg and the users left for Reddit because digg was the one pulling shenanigans back then. Reddit definitely had competition even back then.
Reddit was down all the time during the digg migration
I think it's because these are actual communities. The admins are just regular people you can talk to like normally. You choose your community. They're not faceless corporations and I think when a network is a corporation the platform gets less respectful conversation for understandable reasons.
Yeah that's a great point. I think it would be hard to fully lock other clients out, but you could have an early internet style situation where you had some websites not supporting all browsers.