- cross-posted to:
- technews@radiation.party
- cross-posted to:
- technews@radiation.party
Verge interviewed the maker of Relay for Reddit and says he might survive on a subscription only model of $2-3 USD per month. Lots of limitations inherent in that, but maybe.
How do lemmies feel about this?
You must log in or register to comment.
$3/month is a lot just to be able to use a 3rd party app. I don’t think many users are going to go for it. And it’s not like the developer is making much money off of it, it is all just to pay the new API costs.
RedReader (a realy, really good minimalist FLOSS reddit client) has been granted an exemption due to its strong focus on accessibility. however the project dev has stated that reddit is no longer to be trusted and RedReader will be integrating Lemmy and a few other networks ASAP.
I certainly wouldn’t pay for it, however I am not the target consumer. It doesn’t sound like Reddit is doing itself any favors, if the 3rd party can’t get users, they can’t pay, and if Reddit doesn’t have users, then LLM’s are not going to want their data. Especially as they want relevant quality, so it is a limited window.
It doesn’t really matter, the NSFW filter will drive most people off. The price is fine, people in US would pay that much just for ad removal anyway but internationally, currency conversion will be harsh in some places. For CAD it isn’t that bad atm.
It seems really telling that only one app is going to pay after all their hype about “partnerships”.
Me personally? I am done. Regardless. I have seen intimately how enshitification ruins so many good pieces of software, I am just done. This was the last straw for me. They could revert back to free API. I will be contributing to the fediverse from here on out.
I just hope others without a tech background can understand how important this movement is to the future of a free internet.
As a long-time user of Relay I was very happy to see this the other day. To be honest, I don’t get why more apps aren’t in a similar position. Only hint I had is when the Apollo dev posted backend code, which made me think maybe a bunch of these apps are funneling API calls through their own proxy rather than calling reddit directly.
Currently I’d rather support a FOSS project of my choosing with 3 bucks a month than shell out money that eventually goes to reddit. But it’d be nice for the people who don’t want to leave reddit yet to have an affordable 3rd party app still as an option.
The narwhal dev also said he wants to release Narwhal v2 subscription-only.
Relay is the app I’ve been using for the past decade. It’s great, and I would pay a subscription fee even though I paid for the app, but it wouldn’t solve the other issues with the site. Mods still wouldn’t have the tools they need to be effective and NSFW posts wouldn’t be accessible, for example. Plus I don’t like the idea of giving money to companies run by the likes of Steve Huffman.
Relay was my go to app also, something about the flow of the app UI always appealed to me more than any other apps. So much so, I continued using it even after I found the paid app included trackers (these can be blocked with Warden, a rare app scanner you can find on github).
However even if I wanted to stay on reddit I don’t think I’d pay a monthly subscription.
Reddit really should be paying users, not the other way around. They steal our data for free and seek to profit from it.
Relay I think was the android counterpoint to Apollo in that it is always up to date with the Android design language of the time. It is by far my favourite Reddit app and DBrady is a champ. I don’t know if it’s worth 3USD a month though. Especially when a large chunk of that goes to Reddit. I would definitely be down for a Relay for Lemmy though.
