Sharing this because it's one of the most promising [Android projects we recommend on Privacy Guides](https://www.privacyguides.org/en/android/), and it would be a huge detriment to the Android/Privacy community at large if this developer is no longer able to continue this work :( > Happy New Year! > > DivestOS and the Divested projects as they currently stand are ultimately unsustainable. > > My goal for 2023 was to acquire a grant to continue my work, I was unsuccessful. > > Today I am announcing a fundraiser of raising $12,000 USD by end of February. > > It may be a stretch to ask, but I hope you all have found sufficient value in my work to keep these projects going. > > If it is unsuccessful I will switch to a full-time job and the Divested projects will take a backseat. > > To those who have donated, I truly appreciate your support. > > Thank you - Tavi/Tad.

TL;DR: Reddit is making their tracker-filled mobile app the only way to access Reddit on mobile devices, they are falsely accusing third-party developers of blackmail, and they are on a path to severely lower the quality of content posted on Reddit and increase the amount of spam you see. To stand against these changes, alongside numerous large subreddits, Privacy Guides is not currently available on Reddit. Join us on Lemmy at `!privacyguides@lemmy.one` :) --- As we [discussed](https://web.archive.org/web/20230612031819/https://old.reddit.com/r/PrivacyGuides/comments/13zo1cf/reddit_apis_apps_and_rprivacyguides_blackout/) and announced a week ago on Reddit, the Privacy Guides subreddit is being made private from June 12 to June 14th to call attention to Reddit's most recent anti-consumer behavior. ## What is Reddit doing? A few weeks ago, Reddit unveiled plans to change the pricing for their API from $0 to $12,000 for 50 million requests. For third-party clients like Apollo on iOS or Sync on Android, this suddenly put the cost to create such an app in the realm of [$20,000,000 per year](https://web.archive.org/web/20230610034857/https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_call_with_reddit_to_discuss_pricing_bad/), a figure clearly unsustainable for third-party Reddit client developers. For comparison, Imgur—a website with a similar userbase and size to Reddit—charges developers approximately $166 for every 50 million requests. This change in Reddit's pricing to far beyond any reasonable market value was driven solely to eliminate third-party clients from the market, in order to force Reddit users to use the official app instead, a plan which was successful given that most major third-party Reddit clients have now announced they are shutting down by the end of this month. Reddit's API changes also affect a number of bots which are critical for moderation. Reddit cutting off access to clients and bots which moderators require to effectively care for their communities will only result in Reddit being overtaken by spam and low-quality content. ## Why does Privacy Guides care? The internet is supposed to be an open standard, and information on the internet **cannot** be funneled solely through proprietary first-party clients. The difficulty I had in merely archiving the r/PrivacyGuides announcement post on the New Reddit design (note [everything missing here on internet archive](https://web.archive.org/web/20230612025445/https://www.reddit.com/r/PrivacyGuides/comments/13zo1cf/reddit_apis_apps_and_rprivacyguides_blackout/)) clearly demonstrates the danger of locking information into closed ecosystems like Reddit, where merely accessing this information is subject to their whims. Open APIs and third-party clients are paramount to enabling privacy-friendly access to otherwise proprietary silos on the web. Through the use of those APIs and clients, it was possible to interact with Reddit in an entirely user-controlled, privacy-friendly way. Reddit's restrictions take that choice away, making their official app virtually the only portal to the information on their platform available to mobile users. While Reddit is certainly within their rights to make these changes, *Reddit users* are certainly within their rights to reject these changes and choose an alternative. We—obviously—think that the r/PrivacyGuides community is hugely beneficial to the internet at large, and a lot of great discussions take place informing people about privacy and protecting their data online. All of this taking place on Reddit was a necessary price to pay in order to reach a ton of new people and get them interested in private, open-source technologies, but if Reddit is going to abuse that power and try to control those people into using privacy-invasive clients, the cost of that might outweigh any benefit to us remaining on the platform. ## Reddit's Current Response (Unmitigated Disaster) In the past week, Reddit has largely made two real announcements about this change: Firstly, they announced that they would keep the API free to certain clients which provide accessibility features. It should go without saying that this is just another way of Reddit saying: *Because we are unwilling to make our website and apps accessibility-friendly ourselves, we will very generously let third-party developers do it for us for free.* Their second response has been to [falsely accuse a prominent developer of blackmail](https://web.archive.org/web/20230611225922/https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_will_close_down_on_june_30th_reddits/), and then [double down on their false accusations when confronted with irrefutable proof of their behavior](https://web.archive.org/web/20230609232850/https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_the_community_about_changes_to_our_api/jnk45rr/?context=3). Threatening and accusing people in private messages, and then acting like the victim when those people publish those messages to refute your claims is incredibly toxic and inappropriate behavior from anybody working on any project, much less the CEO of Reddit.com. In my view, this childish behavior from Reddit moves this situation far past the typical money-grabbing moves you should expect from Big Tech corporations and into legitimate concerns about integrity and stability at Reddit. If their leadership is going to devolve into Twitter-esque, dictatorship-fueled decision making, the entire platform can no longer be trusted as a source of knowledge at all. ## What happens on June 15th? I don't know what Reddit's response to this [widespread protest](https://reddark.untone.uk/) will be. In any event, the Subreddit will re-open, but if Reddit's response is to do nothing, then r/PrivacyGuides will re-open in **restricted**, mod-only posting mode. Then we will have a community discussion about our next steps. Reddit choosing to do nothing is—in my opinion—an untenable solution. While we will re-open r/PrivacyGuides in order to allow people to access the vast community knowledge that is already there (while you still can), **it is entirely possible that the subreddit will remain restricted indefinitely.** It is hard to imagine a reason why we should encourage our incredibly helpful and generous community to continue to provide valuable content to Reddit for free, only for Reddit to go down this privacy-invasive, ad-first path. ## What's Next? In any case, I would strongly encourage you to stop using Reddit going forward. The fiascos at Twitter and now Reddit clearly demonstrate that centralized big tech companies can no longer be trusted with being the gatekeepers to user-generated information (as if they ever could, hah!). I think that smaller, federated communities like Lemmy/Kbin/Mastodon are the future of knowledge-sharing on the internet, and the new Privacy Guides community on the fediverse can be joined from any ActivityPub enabled instance, such as: - On **Kbin.social**: https://kbin.social/m/privacyguides@lemmy.one - On **Lemmy.world**: https://lemmy.world/c/privacyguides@lemmy.one - On **Beehaw.org**: https://beehaw.org/c/privacyguides@lemmy.one - On **Lemmy.one**: https://lemmy.one/c/privacyguides - On **Lemmy.ml**: https://lemmy.ml/c/privacyguides@lemmy.one - On **any [other Lemmy instance](https://join-lemmy.org/)**, search for `!privacyguides@lemmy.one` *All of these are links to **the same community**, just pick whichever site you already have an account on.* [Privacy Guides](https://www.privacyguides.org) additionally hosts a Discourse forum at [discuss.privacyguides.net](https://discuss.privacyguides.net) where we have discussions about and analyze various privacy tools.

> You want Chrome 114.0.5735.106 or later on Mac and Linux, and 114.0.5735.110 or later on Windows. (Also relevant to Chromium browsers, e.g. [Brave](https://www.privacyguides.org/en/desktop-browsers/#brave), which you can check at brave://settings/help)

> Since we launched our first paid plans in 2015, our Premium price has never changed. Now the time has come to update our plans. While prices for existing subscribers will not change, we have an awesome one-time offer if you decide to switch to the new plans right now: Get the new plans at half price and benefit from more email addresses, lots of storage, and more features!

With Reddit's encroaching IPO and their poorly planned API changes, we need a place to keep up with privacy topics that isn't tied to an anti-privacy, centralized ~~sinking ship~~ site. Our [forum running Discourse](https://discuss.privacyguides.net/) has been a great place to discuss website changes and answer questions, but it doesn't *quite* provide the same experience as Reddit does for things like sharing news, so we're trying something new: [!privacyguides@lemmy.one](https://lemmy.one/c/privacyguides) is our new ActivityPub-enabled community for sharing links and other information from the privacy and security realm. Welcome! We're going to be trying out posting to this community for a few months to decide if we want this to replace or coexist with the r/privacyguides subreddit, so we'll see how it goes. If you want this to succeed, stay active! Our mission is to become the most inviting and friendly place to discuss privacy and security on the fediverse 😎 ### How do I join the Privacy Guides community on Lemmy? You can join a few different ways: * **On [Kbin.social](https://kbin.social/m/privacyguides@lemmy.one)**, a Lemmy alternative with a more Reddit-like UI and **instant registrations**. [I didn't like](https://www.reddit.com/r/PrivacyGuides/comments/13zo1cf/comment/jmwpic2/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) Kbin *from a hosting perspective* because of some missing features, but for just browsing communities and joining ours it's a great option: [https://kbin.social/m/privacyguides@lemmy.one](https://kbin.social/m/privacyguides@lemmy.one) * **On** [**Lemmy.one**](https://Lemmy.one), this is the server which hosts the Privacy Guides community on Lemmy, and also the server that I admin myself. You are welcome to create an account, but it might take up to 24 hours for your account to be approved. * **On another Lemmy instance:** You can join the community by entering `!privacyguides@lemmy.one` in the search box on your instance. There are [plenty of servers you could join](https://join-lemmy.org/instances), or you could host your own relatively easily if you're familiar with self-hosting. * **On another ActivityPub instance:** You can also probably join by entering `@privacyguides@lemmy.one` or [https://lemmy.one/c/privacyguides](https://lemmy.one/c/privacyguides) in the search box of the ActivityPub software you use, although Mastodon does not seem to pull in posts from Lemmy communities properly in my limited testing, so **YMMV**. --- Verification post: https://www.reddit.com/r/PrivacyGuides/comments/13x7oe3/who_wants_to_try_out_lemmy_privacyguideslemmyone/

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/411763 > ...to keep running as is. > > creator of Apollo, a popular Reddit client for iOS, relays his talks with Reddit about upcoming ridiculous API pricing.