API access was only half the problem. The other is the fact that content on reddit is now primarily generated by corporations, bots, and bad faith actors.

Going there for specific threads (e.g. help posts in programming subs) seems okay-ish, but scrolling the front page is a doomed endeavor at this point... not much different from Facebook or Instagram.

Bro, just stop. You'll get C&Ded. Stop thinking about reddit. Cut it out of your life. You don't need it anymore. Nobody does. We will find another way without it.

Early days is one thing, but if this is the entirety of the code

# WIP

Then there isn’t much to have a discussion about…

I understand you miss it. Most of us do too. But Reddit decided they didn't need us. So just let it die on it's own. We don't need it anymore.

Please don't take personal offense, but you have merely a project scaffold with an unrealistic goal that will be blocked and C&D'd into the ground, without any other projects created.

It doesn't matter how hard you're working on your anonymity, this project will be ripped apart by a horde of lawyers in seconds. You're not only doing something questionable or against ToS, you're directly attacking and sabotaging their monetization. This will not be taken lightly by the legal team of reddit.

You want to provide a better, cooler, more robust and other random buzzwords API than the own of reddit. So, you alone, want to provide a better API than the whole team of reddit does for their absolute core product, all by scraping. This is simply not realistic.

While we're at the topic of monetization, scraping, ETL into your own model and providing the API - for the amount of content that reddit has (quantity, not quality) this will be a highly resource intensive task. How do you plan to fund that, since your API will be better than the official one, I can expect at least the same performance as well, right?

And also, most importantly, even if you magically achieve working around all that and get that working - why? Who is your expected user group? Pretty much every software using reddit moved away from reddit or simply has died. AI gen content is rampant, and most discussions seem like bots talking to bots. There is literally nothing to gain from an API to reddit - so why would anyone bother using it?

I haven't been on Reddit since the day they killed the apps.

Life has been more peaceful in some ways, and I'm not as stressed out. I stopped watching the news too, which had a similar effect.

It's a good initiative, but is it really worth at this time?

I am not entirely sure to be honest. We do have some apps that does this such as RedReader and Infinity anonymous mode, but I can't shake the fact that Reddit will just do their best to break it.

Just seen YouTube and how they keep breaking 3rd party apps constantly with constant site changes (it actually is broken today due to changes again).

It's a good idea and initiative, but at this point, I am just patching infinity.

Reddit is dead to me

Just to add my thoughts, it was not closing free API that made me stop using Reddit. It was their management response / actions / not providing a viable API thus killing 3rd party apps. If management would have changed I would probably go back.

You can’t get any help here, since we’re the ones who got away from Reddit

This project is stupid and DOA. Find something more productive or fun to work on.

Never cared much for reddit, finding lemmy way more interesting anyway.

Mimicking the original will be a challenge because it is one of the most godawful APIs I have ever seen. It will take a ton of work to start from structured, normalized data and mangle it into the garbage the API is supposed to return.

Is there a reason you're scraping data rather than attaching a network sniffer/reverse engineering the official apps and documenting the results? Or map the RSS feed to an API? The main thrust behind my comment is that I think scraping is pretty fragile, so I'm interested as to why other options are infeasible.

Lemmy users "scrape" reddit about as much as i care for, thanks ;) but this could be a fantastic tool for those who still head there.

Awesome