All Good Things Must Come to an End

It is sometimes a hard lesson to learn, but the saying is true: All good things must come to an end. We are blessed to live in a world where almost anything we want is a simple click away. For me, consuming media from various sites such as Reddit and YouTube (mainly things like dog pictures, articles about technology, funny videos and GIFs, and so on) has become one of my favorite past times. I love to see the unique and niche subreddits, to see what people’s hobbies are and how passionate they are about them. I can’t tell you how many amazing things that I’ve discovered just by reading the comments on Reddit or YouTube, finding awesome apps and games like Factorio, which is one of my favorite games of all time. It’s hard to explain in detail how “important” Reddit has become to me over the last 10 years, so it makes it that much more difficult to let go.

In case you haven’t heard, Reddit is going to start charging third-party apps, such as Apollo for iOS, for API access starting around August 1st; these apps cannot function without the API. Reddit is a free to use site/service, so of course, they rely on advertising as a source of income. It is my belief that having ads as a primary source of income is always the first mistake. And sure, not everyone would pay to join a site like Reddit; I’m not sure if I would or not just based on face value. Ads are a cancer of the world, in my opinion, and I believe that there has to be a better way to generate revenue for companies. Reddit’s greed is going to kill most mobile apps for Reddit and force those into using the official Reddit mobile app, which is straight, flaming garbage. Seriously, go download it and see how long you last with the wall of ads. It’s just not worth it.

So, What Can I Do?

I first thought that I would just succumb to using the official mobile app, so I downloaded it and honestly gave it a good try for a few days. It just wasn’t Apollo, plain and simple; Apollo is THAT good. It puts the content front and center, where the official app injects ads in between each post. Not for me. There’s also the fact that I don’t want to support a company that does the things Reddit is doing. I think it’s finally time to leave Reddit for good.

Going forward, this blog post will be continuously updated with my experiences and findings.

Last Update: 6/2/2023

Types of content to find acceptable alternatives for:

  • Photos/GIFs of specific topics (dogs, earthscapes, cabins, tiny houses, retro tech, etc)
  • Videos
  • News
  • Social/Community

Photos

This one is going to be a little hard as Reddit has been my only source for photos and GIFs. However, it was suggested to me to try the Imgur website and app. I have been trying this out for the last day and here are some hot takes:

  • Imgur’s website isn’t too bad, but you MUST have an ad-blocker.
  • The site is organized by tags and you can filter out specific tags, so that’s nice.
  • Speaking of filters, there doesn’t appear to be a more detailed filtering system. I know I’m asking a lot but I would LOVE a filter for text in images.
  • Imgur’s Mobile app is full of ads. Huge pass here.
  • Viewing Imgur’s website via Safari on iPad is semi-acceptable, given that I can’t block ads.
  • I don’t see a way to create a customized “home feed” with just the things I want to see.

I’ll keep trying this out over the next days or weeks to see if it is an acceptable substitute.

Videos

For this section, it’s pretty easy: a self-hosted Invidious instance with Firefox Extension Redirector. Redirector filters aren’t bad to setup but for the average person, this isn’t straight forward. Why am I using this extension? Invidious has 2 main sections: Popular and Trending. What isn’t obvious is that these are Popular and Trending videos specific to that instance of Invidious. If you are like me, you like to have random videos to browse through and find things sometimes that you normally wouldn’t search for. This is where Redirector comes in. You can still go to Youtube’s main page and browse random videos to your liking, but when you click on a video, it will play in your Invidious instance of choice instead of YouTube’s site.

I don’t have a need for a service like TubeArchivist, as I don’t want to keep 99% of the videos that I watch. For that 1% (or videos I want in MP3 format), I use MeTube.

Finally, in the case YouTube makes services like Invidious obsolete or even stops functionality because it detects an ad-blocker (Web V3 trash), I think it will be my time to drop YouTube altogether, maybe even get involved in PeerTube.

News

Yet another simple solution: RSS.

I’ve tried a few different experiments, hosting my own RSS server and trying out multiple RSS clients on iOS/iPadOS. The only negative about RSS is that it does not handle media well at all. It’s for text articles, right?

Currently, I’m trying out an app called Unread. It has the most modern look of any RSS client, it’s a free app, and displays images large enough to actually see them (even though they aren’t as high quality as I would like). I only have two complaints so far:

  • In order to mark articles as read, you have to swipe from the right, which doesn’t seem to work all that well or be consistent, both on my iPad or iPhone. Strange.
  • You have to pay for caching. This isn’t terrible as my Internet speeds are really good no matter where I am.

Expect a better RSS client here once I can get the time to test it out. I may not stick with this one.

The RSS server software that I’m using is Miniflux. I was using FreshRSS, but having to install a mod/add-on (or Cron job) just to get automatic refreshing of feeds is just stupid. That should be a standard option!

Social/Community

I’m sticking with the basics on this one:

  • Mastodon - Currently, self hosting a single user instance with the official Docker container
  • Matrix/Element - I don’t chat with a lot of people, but I do have an awesome group chat going with some Christian friends.
  • PixelFed - I haven’t invested much into this yet but I thought it would be a good time to join now that the iOS app is in test flight.

Conclusion

In the end, we have to stay on our toes at all times because the things we put so much energy and effort into can come crashing down in an instance. It’s a hard lesson to learn but sometimes, it can prompt new opportunities and changes that you need to mature, be more disciplined, and just overall be a better person.

What services and sites are you embracing now that Reddit is going away? Any services or sites you would recommend for the media types above? What changes have you made lately? Let me know on (Mastodon)[https://mast.teamtuck.xyz/@teamtuck].