Christian has released a final update to Apollo with the option to opt out of the refund. I urge everybody that was happy with his contribution to our community to do so since he will have to refund out of his own pocket. And yes, this was for an entire year of the app, but he did I no way know that Reddit was going to change the pricing beforehand when he even asked them what the future for Reddit and Apollo would look like back in the beginning of the year and apparently Reddit said that there wouldn’t be any major changes in 2023!?
Also, the amazingly talented artists of the Apollo icons have contributed with good bye wallpapers that you can get for a donation ❤️
And u/spez tried slandering this man as greedy and selfish. Utterly despicable.
In the grand scheme of history, this is nothing. But it’s hard not to feel like I’m living through a huge moment.
The news, connections, answers, laughter, sadness, shock, joy–all of it–that this app delivered to me will be fondly cherished.
I posted this because for history this might be small but for Christian this is life changing. He devoted himself to giving us top notch service as an app developer so we could interact with our loved community in ways Reddit wasn’t able to facilitate. He was quick to answer comments on the subreddit and would implement things we asked for in a reasonable time.
I was so impressed with his work and was sad to hear how u/spez treated him. I just hope we can give him a good bye gift and send him off knowing that the community is grateful.
Man, Christian is such an inspiration to me, what a great guy. I hope he has success in all of his future projects.
You know, if he could find a way to re-hook Apollo over to one or more Lemmy instances, I think Apollo would immediately become the default Lemmy client for a whole lot of people. What’s more, I expect that a fairly large subset of those people still haven’t even heard about Lemmy yet, and would suddenly be creating new accounts. That would also help to incentivize people to grant his request, and turn down the refund.
Just a thought. I know there would by necessity be an awful lot of work involved to make such a thing happen… but it would probably be worth it.
Numerous people have asked, Christian’s reply is that he’s not looking at it right now. Honestly, his replies sound like he’s going to take a day long nap on the 1st before thinking about anything else.
I kind’a wouldn’t blame him if he did that. The level of vitriol aimed at him in the comment sections of various articles that I’ve read on this topic is positively staggering. People can be really awful sometimes… and people who are seemingly uninformed and/or misinformed, even more so.
There’s a work-in-progress effort called tafkars to create a hostable API relay which Reddit apps can talk to to have it relayed onward to the Lemmy API. If completed, it should allow anything that uses the existing Reddit API to talk to Lemmy with a small app modification. It seems like a bit of a stop-gap solution to me but it’s a cool idea.
I’m currently trying out the app wefwef which is inspired by Apollo for the fediverse. I’m surprised how much better it makes browsing the fediverse feel compared to native browser sites. This gave me a lot of hope for the future here. I’m also a fan of the Memmy App which I’m also testing!
