So, this isn’t meant to be a “guide” or anything but I thought it could be helpful to some.
- Find yourself an RSS feed reader (e.g. Feedbin).
- Grab your subreddit link. (Example:
reddit.com/r/museum) - Add
.rssto the end of that link. (Example:reddit.com/r/museum.rss) - Add your subreddit RSS feeds to your feed reader.
This way, you can keep reading reddit without having to visit it. You will still need an account to participate, of course.
But I asked myself this question: “Do I really want to participate and keep feeding reddit content for free?”
You are what makes reddit what it is. If you can be yourself elsewhere, why waste your precious time on reddit?
You deserve better.
They will likely crack down on RSS next arguing that “most people don’t use it anyway”
100% If it’s not contributing to the bottom line, it’s out
Yeah, I can see that happening.
Yes but it may help some folks with the transition while these new communities get started
That was my first thought as well. They want a walled garden and envy Facebook / Twitter for their anti-user practices. RSS runs counter to that
I’ve moved over to Beehaw purposefully and while this is a nice feature, the point is to get away from Reddit. The majority of content produced there come from links from other websites. It’s just a matter of rebuilding and discussing those things in new networks :)
Not to mention many of the main subs started banning the very sites that kept traffic going to them in the first place. If you ever wondered why your favorite niche blog about any topic stopped posting, its because mods on reddit started classifying anything not mainstream as blogspam.
A lot of it is also the moderation of certain subreddits though that’s not easy to replicate elsewhere. For instance most subreddits dedicated to football (soccer) clubs maintain a tier list of journalists based on their reliability and will only allow reputable sources to be posted on the subreddit.
That’s quite frankly a lot of bullshit that I would otherwise have to sort through myself to get the same information on transfer movements and news
In my head I see them clipping the RSS off. One of the “reasons” for the price hike was to keep AI bots from scraping the site and I assume RSS is one of those ways?
They would 100% do it. No doubt.
I don’t think the comments are available via RSS, and that’s a chunk of Reddit’s usefulness.
The only thing you get out of rss is the title of the post, and a link to the post comments and whatever the external link was (if it wasn’t a self post).
They’ll kill it off eventually. old.reddit is on the chopping block next.
That might not work as you think it would because the rss feed does not include the discussions. For that you need to visit reddit, and discussions are what make reddit what it is. I’d much rather if they migrate here, but if that’s not possible, at least if we have a bot crossposting stuff from there to here, so that we can have our own discussions going on that topic.
half the fun is repeating the same jokes from r/whothefuckup
Even reddit wasn’t this full of niche esoteric subs over night and a lot of that subdivision had to happen because the main subreddits got too big and full of noise. You can still try and foster discussion in larger instances with broader topics and likely get a few bites for discussion while the more niche stuff takes off.
I’m completely new to this whole lemmy thing, but I’m hoping it can take off and grow to be a diverse and varied reddit alternative. Seeming really cool so far.
There are some subreddits that I really will miss and hope to see them come over to the lemmy-verse, but I think in the long run if lemmy can grow enough, I’ll be content with the content (ha)
I’m foreseeing a large influx of people testing out the lemmy waters in the next week. I knew the CEO was a POS but waited to see what he had to say to the Apollo claims. Pretty much sealed it for me. This can be a big site/service if the people use it. I was around for the fall of Digg, and hopefully the fall of Reddit.
Be the change you want to see. Don’t wait for your shit to arrive. Bring it yourself.
Until Reddit stops offering RSS
Nail -> coffin.
This is somewhat of a workaround, but it doesn’t include what I actually use reddit for; the engagement. By that I mean comments, upvotes and users.
I do this with Inoreader. I subscribe to the Top Week RSS for each subreddit. It looks like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/top/.rss?t=week
This cuts down my usage to only the most important/popular topics. It helps me waste less time and gets rid of the addicted feeling where you’re sitting there refreshing the front page seeing the same things you saw five minutes ago repeatedly.
Because I know there’s only going to be ‘x’ number of posts each day from each Reddit I find myself engaging with them more carefully, more mindfully. And when the feed runs out, I go read a book or do something else. It’s very freeing. I’m setting up Lemmy to be the same.
Yes the push-based approach of getting content with RSS is truly great. It is a bit of a shame that RSS got niche, even though most media sites still provide feeds fortunately.
This is actually really clever, I might have to steal this idea.
Thank you so much, this really helps with large subreddits like for example r/de or r/videos where most new submissions are quite uninteresting.
Thank you! I’m also an Inoreader user but didn’t know this trick for subreddits; it’s actually really helpful as for most “niche” communities I follow on Reddit I basically only read posts and never interact so, as long as it’ll work, it seems a good way to keep myself up to date.
I’d rather use my social media time on a platform like what we’re on now and use Google when I need to find an answer to some question that might be answered on Reddit.
My only hope is that it doesn’t turn into Voat and get overwhelmed with fringe view conspiracy cookers and go to poop.
I think that because Lemmy is federated it has a strong defense against becoming Voat. Sure, there will be some instances that pop up that allow/tolerate that shit but then other Lemmy instances can just block them!
This is my concern. That being said, I don’t think that’s quite as likely to happen because the reason for Voat’s creation was fundamentally different. The Lemmy exodus is because of API changes and the treatment of Apollo’s creator, while Voat was created as a result of a crackdown on hate subreddit (/r/fatpeoplehate was the big one, but this was years ago so I might be misremembering things).
That being said, I do specifically remember that the driving force behind the Voat push was “free speech.” I’m pretty sure we know who screams the loudest about free speech at the expense of all else, and it looks like Beehaw at least was created with the core idea of being against that crowd. So, while I can’t speak for Lemmy as a whole, I’m trying to at least be optimistic about Beehaw, since the reason for the exodus is completely different from the Voat exodus,meaning the migrants will have a different composition.
I too am optimistic however I think it’d be rather easy to push fringe views as mainstream ideas as things currently stand on Lemmy etc, just like on Voat. But you gotta start somewhere and I’m glad somebody is trying.
I think the federated approach Lemmy is taking can both help with that and exacerbate it. While it’s easy to push fringe views, it’s also easy to quarantine/block off servers that are going in that direction. I’m not sure what tools are available for doing that in Lemmy, but I don’t imagine it would be hard to block users from a Voat-like server if push comes to shove. It winds up coming down to the culture and values of the server you’re on, and if those go in a direction you don’t like you can also go elsewhere. Sort of like how there were bots that would pre-emptively block people that post in specific subreddit, but more granular control so you don’t wind up with situations like where someone would post in /r/conservative to argue against misinformation, then find themselves blocked from leftist subreddits. Here, if you’re a member of a leftist Lemmy server, that’s part of your identity so it’d be easier to see situations like that and prevent collateral damage from blocking members of the alt-right server from brigading. The only issue there is that it also becomes easier to set up echo chambers, so there’s a fine line to walk. I’m rambling a bit, but hopefully I’m making sense.
True, but the same is inversely possible too, particularly if they heavily infect some of the more popular servers in the federation.
I’ve always loved rss. It’s the best way to get news if you don’t want to use Reddit or Twitter and want one place with different sources.
Same, and it’s an open standard. We need to take the web back to open platforms and standards.
Remember that Chrome extension for YouTube that would replace YouTube comments with a Reddit comment thread instead? Couldn’t you do something similar between Reddit and a Lemmy instance? Scrape all the posts like this RSS feed but replace the comments with Lemmy comments?
I believe you are referring to Voat. I was just starting to use it when this debacle started. I hope somebody
amakes something similar for Lemmy. Maybe the Voat developers will add Lemmy support since I suppose they will be affected by the API changes as well.I thought voat was shut down.
They ran out of money and shut down for good on Christmas Day 2020.
Voat kind of suffered from the problem of Marketing itself as a bAsTIOn oF FreE SpEeCH and thereby attracting mainly the Facebook crowd
Holy cow, I forgot about that extension. That was cool
It works, but feels dirty…
There are so many reddit alternatives, I really hope some alternative will come up on the top and I surely hope that reddit fails massively.
While I agree with you it will be sad to see some of the small communities I’m a part of die, maybe some of them will rescurrect, but I have my doubts on some of them, very niche stuff where it’s hard to gather together people.
Same with my local city sub, it’s probably going to be hard to find a similar active community on the fediverse, at least for a while.
Piracy subs have been the ones that have had back ups just in case even before the api issues. I wish other communities were open to having back ups. Especially ones set up by the mods of subreddits I liked.
What other options are there besides lemmy?
I am liking kbin also
