An update on the state of the Reddit repositories (opens in new tab)

The thing is, it was wholly possible to run your own Reddit clone before. Albeit missing some features like anti-spam.

With this, Reddit is announcing that they are no longer supporting that. Even if you cloned every public Reddit repository, there would be missing pieces preventing you from running your own clone.

One thing they don't mention for obvious reasons, is that they're afraid of the community being able to fork off a new site in the case of majorly unpopular decisions. Understandable given the recent 100 million from VCs.

Perhaps something like

> Start making feature

> People hype it up

> Feature gets scrapped

> Angry mob

They are afraid of not living up to a 9 digit valuation and being able to make VCs money, so they are scrambling for any edge they think they have.

Its the same kind of move that was behind twitter killing off their API.

Calling this "a commitment to do open source right" is insulting to their user's intelligence.

It's definitely frustrating to see products start to get locked down.

On Android I've been happily using F-droid as my primary marketplace. There's lots of high quality apps that are completely open source. But I think some of the more complicated apps end up having maintenance issues. It can be hard for developers to justify spending lots of time fixing bugs and providing support if they're not getting paid.

One option for solving this is to charge for the precompiled version, while freely providing the source. This way users retain source access and the project gets funded. That's what Textual [0] does, which played a big role in convincing me to buy a license.

[0] https://github.com/Codeux-Software/Textual

Open source today is far from where we thought it'd be in the 90s. I did a post on this a while back:

http://penguindreams.org/blog/the-philosophy-of-open-source-...

I'm surprised at the downvotes. Comments seem focused on the differences between the two and not the similarities. If they were exactly the same, there'd be no reason to combine them.

It's a crazy idea. I don't know if it's crazy good or crazy silly. But I think it merits some consideration.

Personally, I use twitter to keep up with very narrow niche news (like subfields within AI or the private space industry), and guess what, I use Reddit to keep up with targeted interests. That both are public by default is fascinating. For one thing, Reddit integration might make it easier to find people to follow.

Or maybe it's a bad idea, I don't know, but it seems original and worth considering, and might lead to interesting improvements for either system.

Uhh, what? Reddit and Twitter have completely different models. Twitter is very person-oriented ("what is this person saying") while Reddit is very topic-oriented ("what are people saying about this topic"). They have completely different use cases.

I'm completely baffled by this. What?

I think google might be the only people to do monorepo (and even they don't - for example, Android and Chrome are different repos), but they have built massive internal tooling to support this. For everyone else, once you get past a certain size, it's much much easier to do multi-repo than monorepo.

Personally, I buy into the 1 service, 1 repo argument. The fewer interferences between services the better.

How is it baiting if it's 100% true ? The original article title is an euphemism... it's not an 'update', it's an obituary.

Specifically, 2 out of 100+ repos are no longer open source.

https://github.com/reddit?q=type:sources&type=public