someone is working on a reddit api compatibility shim so reddit apps could connect to Lemmy without redesigning their apps

https://github.com/derivator/tafkars/tree/main/tafkars-lemmy

“Tafkars stands for “The API formerly known as…”, is written in Rust and is pronounced like “tough cars”. Tafkars is an API proxy that allows apps to talk to Lemmy through a familiar API from a kinder time. The hope is that this will make it easy for app developers to support Lemmy with only minimal code changes.” @fediverse

  • @bdonvr@lemmy.rogers-net.com
    21•1 year ago

    I don’t think an unmodified Reddit app would be able to effectively browse the fediverse no matter how good a translation API is, but it could mean a lot LESS work for an app designer making a lemmy app.

    • @zalack@lemmy.ml
      3•1 year ago

      What would the hurdles be for normal, non-mod users? Once you sign up for an instance, isn’t serving content from all and letting users subscribe to communities pretty much the same flow? I don’t see why the fact that these “subs” are on different servers couldn’t be transparent to the client.

      The client I use – Relay – doesn’t even have a sign up flow, and I suspect could transparently serve Lemmy content with a good translation API.

    • @zalack@lemmy.ml
      3•1 year ago

      God I hope so. No knock against the developers, because it’s a young app and they are improving it almost every day, but Jerboa is really hard to use coming from Relay.

      u/DBrady just has excellent UX/UI design sense.

    • Einar
      4•1 year ago

      Hey. Don’t dis my first love. 😊

      I still have Infinity installed and will miss it sorely. It has some features Jerboa is still missing. But I am hoping some of these 3rd party devs will find a love for Lemmy. If Lemmy can hold a growing community.

    • mintyfrog
      3•1 year ago

      Jerboa is good but certainly not faster or easier than Infinity. The font size setting doesn’t apply consistently, it doesn’t find its exact previous spot when going back to the feed, customization is lacking, and the bottom bar isn’t intuitive.

    • KSP Atlas
      2•1 year ago

      I find Infinity better, jerboa is very uncomfortable to use for me

  • Ghostalmedia
    5•1 year ago

    Interesting, I wonder how they’ll handle communities being decentralized.

    • @emberwit
      3•1 year ago

      Communities themselves are not really decentralized, are they?

      • @Moonguide@lemmy.ml
        4•1 year ago

        Kind of, in the sense that once populations booms, there could be many communities covering the same topic. Which has both upsides and downsides.

        • thisn
          5•1 year ago

          I guess this will be sorted out by itself, as people will be joining the most active communities regarding a topic - at one point the least actice communities of a topic will “die” out.

        • @pcouy@sh.itjust.works
          5•1 year ago

          Since I’ve joined lemmy, I’ve been thinking about some kind of “community merging” feature.

          A “meta community” would be able to “follow” other communities across the fediverse and posts from followed communities would show up in the “meta community’s” feed. Posts from followed communities would remain on their original instances, or they could be duplicated to the meta community’s instance.

          There are a lot of details to work out, but I think this would add a lot more usability to lemmy and the fediverse as a whole

      • @Die4Ever@programming.dev
        2•1 year ago

        they kind of are, each post originates from the instance of the OP not the community

        for example if you click this icon on any post or comment, you’ll see the actual native URL of it

        notice that this post is actually https://social.wake.st/users/liaizon/statuses/110529759862782876 even though the community is https://lemmy.ml/c/fediverse

        the native URL is what you need in order to share a post with other people so they can paste it in their own instance’s search box

      • wakest ⁂OP
        2•1 year ago

        @emberwit @Ghostalmedia well they are in the sense that any account from across the fedi can contribute to them. I just posted this topic from my single user mastodon instance

      • Ghostalmedia
        1•1 year ago

        The individual communities, no, but where they are hosted is decentralized.

        Might not be a big UX problem. If Apollo or RIF had their own instances, and defaulted the feed to “all,” not local, then the experience would probably feel similar to a lot of folks.

        But Apollo’s instance might also have a million+ folks, so that could be a performance problem.