I had a feeling they’ll put something like this, so I went in every now and then to see how infinity will react. I really loved the app, devs did an amazing job
I was an Infinity user but I can’t help but feel this is the wrong move. After all Reddit has done to them they just set up a way to siphon miney straight to them for the devs’ hard work?
Why?
Infinity is open source. You can change the key and user agent (and one more field, but it escapes me at the moment), compile your own APK, and continue using it for free.
Will it work without the reddit API though? Maybe if there’s a way to scrape the site but idk how everything else could be handled.
Where did you see that? He said he’s charging for it and would not tell anyone how to change things to get past reddit, but that there’s a guide already out there that will walk people through the changes that need to be made.
I’d be interested in seeing where he said he’s no longer providing source code updates.
I find it extremely ironic that all the closed source apps, some with subscription options, are closing or moving to support open platforms, while the prime FOSS app is staying with Reddit and going subscription only.
Is is because the sole developer was actually a CS student, now looking for a first job (sick what he achieved at his age right ?) so he has no time to change the app to support Lemmy. However he said that should someone pick up the development, it should not be to hard to integrate the new feeds to it.
See 2nd link in the post.
Even more reason not to deal with a dickish corporation and be on the knife edge of possibly being tens of thousands in the red, if you’re fresh out of school.
Real odd. Those who use Foss maybe moving towards trying to cut themselves off from reddit, subscription models are ones that are going to mainly appeal to power users of reddit who don’t intend to stop.
And I would guess those users would be more drawn to the official app than the third party app, since third party or api might be things they don’t care about.
I don’t think it’s ironic at all - Infinity is and always has been a Reddit client. Subscription fees seems to be the only possible way for it to continue to be a Reddit client and if only a small number of people are willing to pay, then that’s fine. It’s an open source project and doesn’t need to make enough money to pay a salary. It just needs to pay the API costs.
Infinity also doesn’t need any of it’s existing contributors to continue using it, they could all move on (perhaps start work on a Lemmy clinet?) and other people might keep developing Infinity. Open source projects change hands all the time.
If someone wants to make the app into a client for another platform, they can simply fork Infinity. It doesn’t make any sense for Infinity itself to change into a totally different app. And it would be totally different, Lemmy has different features.
It just needs to pay the API costs.
As I wrote elsewhere, I just worry that the dev will get screwed somehow. While before they only needed to make an app and let it loose, now they’ll need to constantly be on a lookout if their users API usage doesn’t exceed what they’re paying in subscription. Or if a thousand bots buy their app with stolen credit cards and Google holds their money. Or if someone hacks their app/server, figure out their API key and racks up a billion calls in spam.
They’re turning a hobby dev project into a business, to be exchanging thousands of money between Google, themselves and Reddit, potentially being in the red for any number of reasons, and dealing with taxes and accounting on top of that.
I mean this is exactly what the Apollo dev said he doen’t want to deal with (he just anticipated a much larger volume than Infinity, but the principle is the same).
Apparently the dev is just starting their first job and don’t have time to port the app to Lemmy, how will they have time if there’s some disaster caused by Reddit?
Maybe it will work out for them, but I’d be super careful doing any business with Reddit at this point.
Yeah it’s baffling. I haven’t touched Reddit since the blackout but I still had my Infinity app installed, just out of nostalgia I guess. While the dev has every right to do businesses with whomever he wants, I expected differently from a FOSS project. Now to delete Infinity…
It is baffling but maybe he sees that there will be very few decent third party apps and an opportunity to monetize his work. I have seen discussion of scripts that compile infinity from source with a personal API key. So, the FOSS option still being maintained is a win I guess. 🤷🏻♂️
True, I just worry that the dev will get screwed by Reddit. If I were a dev or doing some business, I wouldn’t touch Reddit with a very long stick. It’s like poking a huge dung, you can only get a swarm of flies.
I was really hoping to see an “Infinity for Lemmy” app. Oh well; Jerboa it is I guess.
Edit: spelling
A number of devs talked about the pricing and the consensus seems to be that the fee applied to keep the apps afloat would need to be pretty high and they don’t see how it can be sustainable.
I wonder how much Infinity is planning on asking and I doubt its user base will be so keen on paying that much.
Yeah like $5 a month for more casual users. And people paying for apps tend to use them more. I think Apollo’s calculations were like $10-12/mo for higher end users? Anything over $5/mo is probably a no-go so I wonder if it’ll be viable.
And if Infinity’s userbase makes $5/mo viable, I wonder if they’ll get flocks of users from other apps and if that’ll make it non-viable with high-traffic users.
Or maybe they’ll go with a post-paid plan where you pay by usage? That seems iffy.
Social media as a business model rapidly becomes unethical
