I disagree. The obscure subs is what I really loved about reddit. Subreddits based on niche hobbies have a much wider userbase from reddit to pull from while you won't have nearly as many people over here. Overall I'm looking forward to seeing Lemmy grow some more but I think lacking active discussion in some of the more niche communities will make it a little more boring for me than reddit was.
FunkyDuck
They could have just straight up said, "hey, we are getting rid of third party apps because we need to consolidate where our users browse reddit for our IPO". I would have been annoyed, but the way they pretended that all that TPA devs were too unreasonable to work with their outrageous terms genuinely pissed me the fuck off.
Making a website to host AMAs would be an enormous amount of work. Even if they retained their userbase, the costs of hosting a site that wouldn't crash would be significant. If they don't retain their userbase, it ruins the entire reason who many notable people do AMAs which is to advertise whatever they're doing. To make a profit, they would need to monetize it too somehow.
I mean third party apps have had over a decade more time to get polished in comparison to the Lemmy options. I'm not really optimistic that Lemmy is a true competitor to reddit. While I, personally, no longer want to support reddit, only a tiny fraction of reddit's user base has made the switch to Lemmy, and if you go over to reddit right now, not much has changed. Posts are still getting orders of magnitude more interactions than posts here. Some mods will leave but people will eagerly replace them. I also think Lemmy is inherently a little difficult to understand. I'm pretty tech savvy and I had issues figuring it out. The average user is going to struggle a lot which is bad for becoming more widespread.
The issue with Yang is that he's proposing cutting other social safety nets and replacing them with UBI which would put a lot of people in worse situations. UBI would be great but we also need robust social programs.
Exactly lol. Also the swiping on comments and posts to upvote, save, reply, etc behaves differently. I find myself accidentally downloading posts when I'm just scrolling.
I doubt they'll be getting rid of old reddit. The main reason third party apps were shut down was so that reddit could serve ads. They can serve ads on old reddit. Old reddit also isn't being updated anymore so development costs are really low.
I'm honestly just over reddit. Even if all the apps came back for free I'd probably try sticking with lemmy. Not a fan of a company that clearly doesn't give a shit about their userbase. Good for the third party devs who are making it work with subscriptions but I'm not willing to pay a subscription to go straight into reddit's pocket.
It's overall pretty good so far but I find that the swipe interactions with comments and posts can be a bit clunky. I frequently will swipe too far and accidentally save a comment when I just want to upvote. I'm still so used to Sync though.
I used to use AlienBlue on my iPod touch way back in the day haha. Eventually got an Android phone and tried out a couple of apps. I think I tried baconreader and RIF along with Sync. I just liked Sync a bit better and have been using it since probably 2014 or so.
It sucks because journalists do need to make money to continue reporting. Spamming sites with ads is bad for the reader's experience too. Not totally sure what the solution is.