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How does anyone even use Reddit? Why is the site so broken? (hexbear.net)

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by Dirt_Owl@hexbear.net to c/askchapo@hexbear.net

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I hardly use the site and I just tried making an account to ask a question on a hobby subReddit.

The site is plagued by errors, every five seconds "We had a server error"

Any time I tried to post "You post was automatically removed" no explanation. And this isn't a "you posted something against the rules" kind of thing because the posts I was trying to make were the same as the one other people were making on the sub. Half the time even when I tried to comment on a post the "server encounted an error".

Not to mention the site blocks you if you try to use a VPN.

Is it because I'm using mobile Firefox? Who cares? If Lemmy can function fine on a mobile browser, Reddit, one of the most famous and popular social media platforms on the internet can.

So I deleted my account. Why bother having a Reddit account if you can't even use it? I know complaining about Reddit is cringe and overdone, but damn I had no idea how far the site had fallen.

I swear these popular sites are trying to destroy themselves. There is no logical reason they should be this broken. It's almost like these corporations are purposely trying to break the internet.

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[–] PorkrollPosadist@hexbear.net 11 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

In practice, it's not so bad. It basically exists so you boost twitter posts without doing the whole screenshot copy-paste rigamarole (and so people can tell it's legit and not just a fake screenshot). Occasionally I'll see somebody boost some Adam Johnson or Jeet Heer tweet on Masto and it is because of bird.makeup. In my experience it does a pretty poor job of keeping in sync though. A lot of accounts only show old tweets.

I feel like this is different for Twitter and Reddit though. Mirroring twitter kind of makes sense. You don't see anything unless you follow an account (opt in), and you can boost a meaningful tweet and it's not particularly obnoxious. Having hundreds of RedditGPT ass communities floating around making tens of thousands of automated comments and hundreds of thousands of automated votes that we can't even comment in would be obnoxious as hell. It might make sense if the communities could be bridged, but Reddit will never develop the APIs to make that possible. As long as Reddit is read-only, it makes more sense just to link to a libreddit instance.

[–] asante@hexbear.net 6 points 2 months ago

In practice, it's not so bad. It basically exists so you boost twitter posts without doing the whole screenshot copy-paste rigamarole (and so people can tell it's legit and not just a fake screenshot). Occasionally I'll see somebody boost some Adam Johnson or Jeet Heer tweet on Masto and it is because of bird.makeup. In my experience it does a pretty poor job of keeping in sync though. A lot of accounts only show old tweets.

yeah bridges are pretty neat

I feel like this is different for Twitter and Reddit though. Mirroring twitter kind of makes sense. You don't see anything unless you follow an account (opt in), and you can boost a meaningful tweet and it's not particularly obnoxious. Having hundreds of RedditGPT ass communities floating around making tens of thousands of automated comments and hundreds of thousands of automated votes that we can't even comment in would be obnoxious as hell,

god bless that ever happens lol. never

[–] ProletarianDictator@hexbear.net 4 points 2 months ago

This wouldn't be annoying if well implemented IMO.

If bridge servers could configure:

source whitelist / blacklist (subreddits, users, etc.)
post content types to mirror (links, images, text posts, comments, etc.)
vote behavior (ignore votes from reddit, lemmy, or both)
fetch behavior (federated servers, cache advertisement, polling frequency, comment thread max depth, etc.)

we could either federate with a bridge configured to our liking or run our own instance.

Example ideas:

mirror only the decent Marxist subs from reddit.
mirror some lib subs for posting bridge links to /c/the_dunk_tank instead of screenshots or the reddit link, which would be better for privacy & opsec and allow us to comment and rebuke BS or dunk without interacting with reddit.

I had a discussion with an irl friend about the various proxy frontend servers (nitter, libreddit, etc.) and how the cat-and-mouse game of blocking / rate limiting makes them unreliable and annoying to use. We discussed the idea of frontends federating their cached content with one another, where queries to the frontend would check other federated servers for the cached content before trying the official API, making it easier for proxies to avoid getting rate limited and preventing rate limiting and breaking API changes from blocking access to content already cached.

Direct ActivityPub integration is basically that, but with a bunch of added benefits:

interaction with the content
access the content with the same (open source) client they use for the fediverse
access more content than their proprietary counterparts, making the fediverse more appealing to normies who just want to laugh at memes
display links posted to both Lemmy and reddit as crossposts, so users could browse by local / subscribed, but also see the reddit comment section if they desire