creek

I use MacOS because I’m lazier.

"Our pricing is $0.24 per 1,000 API calls, which equates to <$1.00 per user monthly for a reasonably operated app," the Reddit worker said.

Uhh... Plenty of services charge less than half of that for the same number of API calls, and they are still able to make money. I would imagine that as large as Reddit is, their cost per 1k calls is way less than $0.10, unless their API is poorly engineered and inefficient AF. This is 100% them just trying to drive third parties out so they can get that sweet sweet ad revenue.

What's funny is there is nothing stopping them from making their own instance. I think the hesitation stems from them coming to grips with reality that few people really want to engage with their messaging when they step out of their bubble.

Ultimately I agree with you. It's mostly going to come down to getting more people acquainted to this mindset.

I had a bit of a rocky start, but I picked up the concepts fairly quickly.

The Good:

• The discussion threads here remind me of what Reddit's discussions were like about five years ago.
• Comments feel more meaningful and thought-provoking as opposed to a race to "craft the wittiest meme."
• The community here seems to be relatively friendly and welcoming.

The Less Good:

• I find the mobile experience quite clunky at the moment. For the site, there seem to be some random overflow issues, and the interface and UI elements feel a bit too small for a mobile experience. The lack of polished, dedicated apps is somewhat of a bummer, but I'm hopeful the community will fill these gaps over time with dedicated applications.
• The onboarding process is somewhat lackluster. It seems more geared towards an audience that is already familiar with federated services. I feel most new users will default to lemmy.ml out of an unwarranted sense of FOMO for not being a direct member of the largest instance, simply due to a lack of understanding of how federated apps work.
• Redundant communities across multiple instances could become problematic over time. Personally, I would like to see something like user (or even mod) specified mono-communities, grouping multiple communities across multiple instances into a single thread. For example, if a user went to m/movies, whoever runs that mono could add movie-specific feeds from places like lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, etc.
• We need to have a serious discussion about generating funds for instances. Dedicated servers with high traffic can get incredibly expensive. I fear that many smaller instances will eventually go dark due to escalating operational costs. Ko-Fi donations will only go so far. We, as a community, need to start thinking of more sustainable alternatives that align with the community's core values.
• The documentation for the JS SDK could use some TLC. Thankfully, it's fully typed with Typescript ❤️, so it's not too cumbersome to work out what everything does, but more code examples and descriptions for all the various methods would be a welcome change.

All in all, I'm happy with my decision to check this place out and am hopeful more people will come aboard in time. It's already become a part of my daily routine.

Honestly, and I say this with no disrespect, but I feel like the UX is pretty lackluster across this entire ecosystem. It's understandable, since I would imagine the bulk of developer priority is going towards just making things work as reliably as possible on the backend side of things. Fortunately, given the open source nature of things, I feel like the community will fill these gaps in over time. :)