Lemmy world was growing at a decent pace leading up to July 1st, then had a big influx following the API deadline. However the last week in particular has seen a decline.
Engagement still appears to be the same, although a little lower than the start of the month. A few of the other instances i have been checking follow a similar pattern.
Do you think we will continue growing at a steady pace, or do we need another big trigger to get users to migrate? For Mastodon, it seems there's a big trigger every other week to drive users away from Twitter, but with Reddit, the revolt seems to have quietened down considerably.
Technically, you can still create a dev app in your profile and get a free API key “for debug purposes”, and ReVanced-like patches for Android clients such as Infinity allow inserting such keys. However, there is no NSFW access and I imagine this loophole is getting closed soon.
Web scraping from old.reddit is another option used by clients such as Stealth. It is slower but maintains anonymity and NSFW access.
Reddit said during the 3rd party app backlash that old.reddit is not going anywhere...
...so it’s dead in 6 months?
(They reassured the Apollo dev of cooperation in 2023-01 so I’m extrapolating their credibility)