With news that the recent purchase of Reddit and that the new owners might stop free access to it's API by third-party apps the future; several FOSS Reddit Readers now seems in jeopardy.
The developer of Redreader - a Reddit reader available on F.droid recently reached out to Reddit to voice their case that as their app doesn't monetize access to Reddit, that it might be allowed a dispensation and have free access to the API.
The communication seems to be done in good faith, but as of yet no decision has been made.
Redreader's dev, QuantumBadger, posted an update on the situation (below).
They ask for any questions or feedback to Reddit to be respectful.
Message from QuantumBadger follows:
I posted last week about the changes Reddit is planning to make to the API. Thank you everyone for your kind messages since then -- I really appreciate the support for the app from the community!
Specifically, Reddit announced that they are planning (in just a few weeks time!) to charge apps like RedReader to access the site, restrict access so that third party apps can only read some of the content on Reddit, and impose a set of restrictive new terms on developers.
This month is actually RedReader's 10th birthday -- it was in April 2013 that the app was released. So it's unfortunate that at a time when we should be celebrating a decade of RedReader, we have to be concerned about its survival instead.
Since RedReader is a totally free and open source app, the proposed changes make RedReader's continued existence questionable, and I'll go into some of the reasons for that in a moment.
The discussion with Reddit so far
I had a call with Reddit yesterday about the proposed changes. We mostly discussed the economic aspects of the changes, and some of the practical ways in which their proposals would make any open source apps difficult or impossible.
They said that RedReader as a community accounts for a significant proportion of their API usage due to the number of users, even though the usage of each individual RedReader user is reasonable. They want all apps to pay for access, but don't currently have any concrete plans about non-monetized open source apps.
During the call they said that third party apps like RedReader represent something like an "opportunity cost" for them, as they are unable to gather revenue directly from these users. They say that usage of third party apps is increasing over time, and this is a threat to them. They raised the question of what would happen if such apps became the majority, in which case it would be unreasonable to expect the minority of official app users to bear the costs for everyone else.
They did acknowledge that RedReader in particular is a unique case, and they're going to have internal discussions about the best way to handle this. The person I spoke to sounded genuinely interested in learning more and made it clear that they want to find common ground.
I made a bunch of points, but to briefly summarize:
- RedReader is a free and open source app -- we don't show ads, charge subscriptions, sell the app, or so on, so there's really no revenue stream to tap into here.
- There is no "intermediary" between RedReader users and Reddit -- if someone uses RedReader, they connect directly to Reddit, not to a server I control.
- Because of this, it's best to think of RedReader a bit like a web browser -- even though usage from RedReader as a community is high, it's really just a bunch of individual users accessing Reddit directly as if through a browser. There's no central organization or service responsible for all the usage.
- While third party app users don't directly contribute to revenue, Reddit is highly reliant on its community to produce and moderate content for free. Users of non-official apps are often technically competent "power-users" who contribute a disproportionately large amount of content, that Reddit as an organisation benefit from. This includes posts and comments written for free by users, the free labor done by moderators to keep subreddits under control, and even something as simple as users upvoting or downvoting posts to sort the good from the bad.
Billing users for access would be uniquely difficult for an open-source app like RedReader:
- If I wanted to bill users for their usage, and keep my API access key protected, I'd need to set up my own servers to proxy all requests through. In other words, rather than connecting to Reddit directly, the app would connect to a server I control, which would bill the user's "RedReader account", and then pass on the request to Reddit. It's better for everyone if users are able to connect to Reddit directly, without having to trust me as a middle-man.
- (of course, one positive side effect of this would be that Reddit's ability to track users is reduced, since all the requests would come from one IP)
- Storing RedReader's private API key on the client side is a non-starter -- as an open source app, any secrets are visible in the source code (and even if I left the key out of the source code, and inserted it during the build process, Android apps are very easily decompiled). Storing the key inside the app itself means that someone could easily steal it and bill me for their usage of Reddit, resulting in unlimited financial liability on my part.
- I'm also not the only person who needs to regularly compile the source code into the finished app -- the F-Droid app store maintainers compile the app themselves, for example, and so do the nearly 200 (!) contributors who have submitted code to RedReader over the last decade.
- One other alternative is to get every user to sign up as a Reddit Developer, generate their own API key, and enter it into the app when they run it the first time. However this isn't exactly a quick or simple process, and I think it would be enough of a hurdle that most people would just stop using the app. It would also make it impossible to anonymously use Reddit without an account.
Please do feel free to share this post to spread awareness, because even though Reddit haven't shared any concrete details yet, their deadline for implementing these changes is only a few weeks away (June 19th).
If you decide to contact Reddit with questions or feedback about this, please be respectful! A load of abuse will do more harm than good, and we should show that we're a community worth protecting.
I'll let you guys know if I hear any more about this. Thank you again for your support, and I hope these changes don't end up irreparably harming what we've built over the last 10 years here.