whelp, there it is
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And now I’m here after 17 years on Reddit. 🤷♂️
15 for me. No ragrats.
You and me both… I have seen that place through its ups and downs. From the narwhal bacon’s at midnight to Jolly Rancher, Zoop and the swamps of drogba.
I finally left my account a few days ago and haven’t been back since. The place is a shell of what it used to be and it’s been really very refreshing have a scout about somewhere else.
Fuck greed… It eventually ruins everything!
the swamps of drogba
Ha ha… Nice ! Image didn’t load without a click, it was risky but a lot better than what I braved myself for :)
me too… though not sure how long on reddit
Welcome and enjoy your stay!
I am exited about this new community & the potentials that can be created. Let’s conceptualize, design & built the server & application side - organically as our needs evolve over time. !
It is sad to see an amazing app become rendered useless due to some companies greed. They were not even being reasonable with pricing nor did they really give the dev time to figure out what to do.
I really hope that everyone leaves reddit and comes to the fediverse. Mastodon had a huge boost and it completely replaced twitter for me. I am sure Lemmy can do the same.
I’m hoping Christian ports Apollo to Lemmy. I’m not sure what the feasibility of doing so is but I’d actually pay a monthly subscription for the ability to continue using it
I think he wants the apps to die with its legacy. Maybe he would make another app that does it. I hope he does and I would pay a modest subscription for it.
I hope that on June 30th, when it shuts down, the app doesn’t just give an error message but instead displays some kind of farewell message.
Yeah a farewell would be good. In my dream scenario, he would open source it and the community could port it. That might be unlikely though
honestly, me as well
How do you get to the point where you’re accusing Christian of blackmailing you in this situation? You’re the 500lb gorilla who’s driving all these app developers out of business. Even if you really feel like these app developers have been free riding on your largesse, how do you have so little perspective to be this petty and spiteful?
I listened to the recording, and read the transcript, and I can… I can see it. Not overtly, not intentionally - but the dev did not communicate clearly at all.
Twice the Reddit representative asking him to repeat himself, and still he failed to actually specify his intentions. The wording in the transcript never actually expanded what the dev was saying (‘buy out Apollo’). The evasive language made it sound like a shakedown, ‘pay me $10mil to make this all go away’.
I linked the dev’s own transcript above, but the actual quotes from the dev:
I could make it really easy on you, if you think Apollo is costing you $20 million per year, cut me a check for $10 million and we can both skip off into the sunset. Six months of use. We’re good. [Low voice:] That’s mostly a joke.
Okay, if Apollo’s opportunity cost currently is $20 million dollars. At the 7 billion requests and API volume. If that’s your yearly opportunity cost for Apollo, cut that in half, say for 6 months. Bob’s your uncle.
I was just saying if the opportunity cost of Apollo is currently $20 million a year. And that’s a yearly, apparently ongoing cost to you folks. If you want to rip that band-aid off once. And have Apollo quiet down, you know, six months. Beautiful deal. Again this is mostly a joke, I’m just saying if the opportunity cost is that high, and if that is something that could make it easier on you guys, that could happen too. As is, it’s quite difficult.
Now, we know that what the dev is doing is essentially offering to outright sell Apollo to end the demand it represents to Reddit. He doesn’t expect them to take it, but a lot of users asked if it were possible, and he’s suggesting it anyway.
But the wording of all of this never specifies ‘buying Apollo’. It sounds like he wants Reddit to like… pay him his ‘protection fee’. I’m sure he means ‘go quiet’ as in like, ‘go quietly into that good night’ (shut down) or ‘stop being so demanding’ (be retooled), in fact he later clarifies he means the latter and the Reddit representative apologises profusely.
But man, that was worded so poorly, and he was given two opportunities to clarify, and he just… didn’t. Only when the Reddit stand-in asked if he was suggesting Reddit buy his silence and compliance did he clarify that wasn’t at all what he was saying.
It was completely unintentional, no doubt. But it was miscommunication of the highest order, and it damaged the lines of communication so irrevocably it probably incentivised Reddit to cease negotiations completely.
The problem is this, from the transcript:
Me: I said “If you want Apollo to go quiet”. Like in terms of- I would say it’s quite loud in terms of its API usage.
Reddit: Oh, go quiet as in that. Okay, got it. Got it. Sorry.
Me: Like it’s a very-
Reddit: Yeah, that’s a complete misinterpretation on my end.
Me: Yeah. No, no, it’s all good.
Reddit: I apologize. I apologize immediately.
The “threat” part was resolved right there. Steve just wanted to retcon the conversation as a way to dog Christian. He didn’t anticipate Christian was gonna roll in with receipts.
Yeah, I found that interesting. I generally don’t attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence, and I imagine either (or both) of these is likely:
- The ‘evasive’ language made everything feel implied, that when pressed to outright admit his intentions he falls back. He was evasive, evasive, evasive, pressed, fell back. Still he did not clarify he was selling Apollo, only that ‘go quiet’ meant ‘pay me off and Apollo stops making calls’. It’s possible Spez did not believe him and was trying to deescalate.
- Internally discussing the outcome of the call with other members on staff, they may have felt (1) was true, or Spez accepted the explanation but other staff didn’t; they discussed the implications of each possible intention; and they collectively decided they should probably treat it as a threat since it remained ambiguous. It’s possible Spez did want to believe him but other staff didn’t.
The conclusion doesn’t have to be that Spez believed him, then personally as an individual decided “oh, actually, fuck it” and decided to lie about it anyway. In fact I’d say that of the three possibilities, that’s the least likely.
I listened to the recording and it was … messy. Christian wasn’t clear at all and it seems his intention of making what he described as a lighthearted jest fell like a lead balloon at the Reddit guys feet. To my mind it would have been a very important conversation and therefore if I was Christian I would have kept it business-like and clear. It still doesn’t excuse Reddit for weaponizing the conversation and screaming blackmail which makes the CEO come across as a man-baby throwing a fit.
I agree. When I read and listened to the conversation, it’s mostly clear that it isn’t what he meant but it could definitely be construed in a different way. I think it was a pretty poor choice of words to demonstrate how much of the userbase uses third party apps and how much sway they actually have.
That said, it is what it is. Reddit’s PR team is definitely going to try to spin this as negatively as possible even if the Apollo dev is only trying to make a point. At least there were recordings so we can come to our own conclusions.
I imagine his intend was to imply - or at least put pressure on - the idea of Apollo actually costing them $20mil was an inflated number. The idea that it was a real and on-going cost, and had been for a decade, and he’s basically daring them to buy Apollo. Because if that number was real, they should leap at the chance:
If you want to rip that band-aid off once. […] Beautiful deal.
I believe that’s why it was ‘mostly a joke’ - he never expected them to take it, he doesn’t believe it actually costs them that much. It’s not what he’s taking from them - it’s what they feel entitled to take from the users, and they blame him for being in the way.
Personally I agree it doesn’t cost that much - I believe they believe it does, but only because they look at Apollo’s userbase and activity, and decided “oh boy, if we could sell ads to those users and sell their data at those rates, this is how much we would make” and decided that means Apollo is somehow costing them that. I don’t think ‘opportunity cost’ is an appropriate concept to price on, because it relies on obviously false assumptions.
Apollo is definitely costing them server bandwidth, as are the other apps. And it seems all the devs were ready and willing to cover the costs, even negotiate how their users could still be a revenue stream. But Reddit believes they were owed the same profit of Apollo’s users that they would make off of their own, and I think that’s nonsense.
After all, if somebody pirates Photoshop, it’s stupidly naïve to think that every single one of those users would be willing to pay Adobe $80 a month (in some countries that’s more than they make in 3+ months). And if somebody goes to a friend’s house and watches a Blu-Ray with them, it’s absurd to expect they mail a check for $20 to their local theatre.
The expectation that somebody using something convenient/free would use it just as much if it was demanding/unaffordable is… like, they’re not stupid, right? They can’t possibly be that stupid to think that was even attainable profit for them. I just don’t understand why they think that ‘opportunity cost’ is real.
I think a back of the envelope cost for what each user makes reddit per month was something around $0.22 per month. Which is nowhere near the $2.5 per month their API pricing was suggesting.
This wasn’t a question of opportunity cost, and setting prices in good faith. They simply wanted to kill any competition and somehow thought they could get away with this. Hopefully we can show them they can’t with the blackout and migrating to other online communities.
Yeah, I felt the same when I read his post on Reddit. He worded things incredibly badly, and even I, when reading his post, got the impression that he wanted 10 million dollars to “make their problem go away”. It almost feels like he was testing the water by being vague about it, before backpedaling when he realized they weren’t into that.
[Edit] I get that he was probably trying to prove the point that their price was ridiculous and Apollo couldn’t be costing them that much, but man. Terrible way to communicate that. You’re not trying to sell your old TV to some guy in a bar here!
I’m still not clear what the alleged threat was, that the app would… make API calls? earning reddit money? That Christian would say unfriendly things about the company that screwed him? What threat is an app developer to a corporation? It’s just patently absurd.
Weaponizing the community can be pretty powerful.
I love that Christsin had recordings. Can’t wait to see how spez’s AMA goes.
That AMA is immediately going to turn into ‘The Roast of Spez’ and I’m honestly quite looking forward to it. It won’t change anything since Reddit’s already too far round the ‘enshittification’ U-bend but it might be the last funny thing that’s ever posted there.
The AMA will be heavily moderated. I doubt any staff will let any saucy comments reach the CEO.
He knew things could go ugly. Good thing he made the recordings.
Going to miss using Apollo. Great design and Christian built it with the user experience first.
FYI, a lemmy iOS app, Mlem, is in active development, and we hope to be at 1.0 by July 1. It’s heavily inspired by Apollo, but, obviously, with changes for lemmy.
Stay tuned and subscribe to c/mlemapp for updates!
Edit: I want to note that, since one of the biggest sticking points with 3rd-party apps has been both accessibility for the blind and deaf and mod tools, they’re both on our minds as we design the interface. Getting both right will, of course, take time, but we want everyone to know that we fully intend to make our app usable for everyone.
Been using it for a few days, and it’s very nice. Not feature complete, obviously, but what’s there is great.
Glad you like it-- there will probably be many changes as soon as it gets updated (we’re still figuring out what works and what doesn’t). But, and everyone should be aware of this: v1.0’s goal is “be functional and stable”. Features will get added as we go (hopefully quickly). Apps like Apollo, RIF, etc, are mature, having been developed over years of work and user feedback. And while we can stand on the shoulders of giants like Christian Selig with regard to our direction and goals, we’re just getting started.
That said, we’re here to serve the community as we are also part of it, so we are doing all we can to build a great app!
Edit: I want to note that, since one of the biggest sticking points with 3rd-party apps has been both accessibility for the blind and deaf and mod tools, they’re both on our minds as we design the interface. Getting both right will, of course, take time, but we want everyone to know that we fully intend to make our app usable for everyone.
This is excellent to hear. If you’re still on reddit, you should post this to r/blind, as they’ve been in limbo about whether their tools will be granted an “exception” to use the reddit API and they may be looking into alternatives for their community.
I’ll consider it, but feel free to x-post this there or make your own post. We’re not exactly in PR mode right now since these tools and features are still in their conceptual stages and we’re still trying to figure out how best to implement them-- especially the accessibility features. We’re looking to bring on an accessibility specialist to the team to consult with us, so if anyone would like to help on that front Please let us know by joining our Mlem app chat on Matix.
We’ll also be making a wider recruitment post to expand our dev team in the next few days, so keep an eye out for that, too! We’re currently a tiny team of passionate volunteers, and there’s a LOT to do!
edit: Link to GitHub project iif anyone wants to get a feel for where we are now.
Just want to say I found and installed your app mlem on ios. So far so good. One bug I noticed is on my first login, after I closed the app, it deleted my logged in account. Logged back in and now working well. Forgot to do a bug capture but it hasn’t come up again. Amazing work, and really appreciate you helping people get access to Lemmy as a community.
there is also Jerboa on Android for folks who are on Boost, which is also going to inevitably disappear lol
I remember seeing somebody mention a Reddit-like wrapper for the Lemmy API so that existing Reddit clients can be interoperable with Lemmy without changing any code. Does anyone have more information about this project? It would be great if we could use open-source clients like Infinity (what I use for Reddit on Android) with Lemmy without rewriting them.
Yeah I’m a Boost user and I’m using Jerboa. It’s not such a shock going from Reddit to here thanks to Jerboa.
While I appreciate the effort that can go into building a good app… Jerboa sucks. Going from something like RiF to Jerboa is like having some teeth pulled… and being aware of all the little gaps where your teeth used to be.
I hope this changes in the future, in the meantime, I’m planning to write my own, in the middle of everything else I’m doing.
Ye Jerboa could be better, but like with Mastodon I expect some improvements to arrive quickly and for new apps to appear as well in the near future. Such is open source development lol
I have the Mlem app but I’m have problems logging in, during login it says I I’m logged into beehaw.org but then says can’t connect to beehaw.org. Am I doing something wrong?
it may have to do with the popular lemmy instances being slammed right now. Until very recently, they weren’t handling a lot of heavy traffic-- after Christian Selig’s initial announcement about the Reddit API changes, there was a massive spike in traffic from Reddexiters, and, now, again within the last hour since his latest post. Instance admins are expanding their capacity, but can only do so much, being independent volunteers running servers on their own.
Give it time. the servers are a bit bogged down right now.
I just tried it again and it’s now working. Can’t wait to test it out!
Good luck on that, and thank you for your work (saying this as an Android user, but every platform deserves a nice Lemmy client!)
Do you need beta testers?
the beta is currently open in testflight, I believe. we’ll be forming user testing groups in the near-future.
I’ll enable testflight on my new phone and try it out. Hopefully I can provide some useful feedback.
@BrooklynMan @mint That’s so cool! I’ll keep an eye out for it
Good to hear. I’m kinda hoping the Apollo source will become public once it closes. Anything that gets us close to that kind of experience would be great.
I’m the UX designer on the app, so the idea is to get close in terms of usability and style while making the app “our own”. So, the app will, ideally, feel a lot like Apollo, but without outright copying it.
We want to take the best of Apollo (minus some things we don’t like about it), and make something that’s inclusive of how lemmy works and operates.
Can we expect these improvements to come to Jerboa as well?
I’m not involved in that project, but it’s an open community project. I’m sure you can go to them and voice your wishes.
minus some things we don’t like about it
What don’t you like about Apollo? If you don’t mind me asking.
well, as a UX designer, there are some decisions he made, years ago, that were based on an older philosophy of iOS interaction design that have since been updated. An overreliance on list display modalities, for example, pull-up menus, and other minor things in the interface which make complex workflows tedious and which can be optimized using more contemporary workflow ideologies. Stuff that, as a solo developer, he didn’t have time to address but which, as a new team starting out, we can redesign from the ground up.
We’re starting fresh, so we don’t have to worry about changing some monolith this that already exists. We have a lot more freedom than Christian does/did. We want to set a foundation based on the best of what we’ve learned from the greats but with a path for growth for the future for ourselves and our users.
@TheRoarer @BrooklynMan test
Thanks for the already great work. It’s a bit barebones right now but easy to use. Excited to see what will be coming to the app!
i’m already using mlem, and it’s quite nice! yes, it needs some polishing still, however it’s a great alternative to what i’ve been using for 3 years (Apollo).
While I’m coping that Christian “ports” Apollo over to work with Lemmy, I love what you guys are doing with Mlem. I’m in the beta via TestFlight and what’s there works quite well (even though you can clearly tell it’s early days).
I’m very new to iOS development, but if I find the time and motivation I might put in the hours to contribute a feature or two.
He mentioned in his post he isn’t interesting in doing that and is instead focusing on his 2nd app. Sad but understandable
Testing right now! 👌
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really? i was under the impression it was an open beta. hmmm… I’ll ask about that.
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Maybe, maybe not. I’ll update my comment when i have more info.
Apologies in the meantime if it turns out you did nothing wrong.
@mint final test
@Wenwald @BrooklynMan @mint test
This is a big reason why I’m here as of today. I just can’t in good conscience support what Reddit is doing. I’ve been an Apollo user since it launched out of beta. I jumped at the chance to have paid Christian twice for both the original premium upgrade. And then the Ultra one later down the road. I just adore the app. When I switched to Android I still found myself missing it terribly. Since switching back to iOS. I’ve averaged 15-20 hours per week just using Apollo.
End of an era :(
I’m a more recent Apollo user, having switched to iPhone last year. But I’m in the same boat. The third party apps are the only way to go on any platform.
I’ve also been a paying Reddit gold (now premium) user for, I dunno, maybe 10 years. It’s offensive that after all that, I can’t run the software I want to run to access the site. It’s a sign of enshittification.
And frankly, Apollo or not, Reddit isn’t what it used to be. It’s less friendly and welcoming than the narwhal days when /r/LucidDreaming was the hottest community. It’s more abrasive now, more childish. Like the rest of the internet, I suppose.
Yeah, it is completely different than what it used to be. There would definitely be times when a hivemind mentality would get borderline insane. The first subreddit I discovered was r/atheism. And it was nice seeing other people like me. But I remember asking honestly about a girl I was dating at the time being Lutheran and wondering if it could work. Some were supportive. But some people were vile. It was then I could see how nuts it would get.
The communities are so large it has almost gotten too big for its own good. It’s made the people who run the site into total monsters. I started off lurking the site about 14 years ago. And the finally made an account 3 years after. 11 years down the drain, I remember recommending the site to people all the way back then. Especially when I started discovering a lot of the meme subreddits that I would share with friends.
Yeah. You will always get hivemind on insular’ish communities though. Lemmy is probably already just as bad in that regard.
I see your Lutheran+/r/atheism example and raise you dating a capitalist on Lemmy.
I see what you mean. Admittedly, I’m not even 24 hours on here or Lemmy or Tildes. I’m just searching and hoping one sticks.
You might also check out https://kbin.social
FWIW, some friends and I are running our own Lemmy instance, but we’re not completely sold on it either yet. And just software-wise, some pretty important things are missing. There’s actually no way to see, besides going into the database and querying it directly, a list of users on your own instance, for example.
And of course community-wise, Lemmy.ml (the most popular instance, run by lemmy devs) has some questionable moderation. It’s probably better to read about that on another instance, since discussion of censorious moderation is itself subject to censorious moderation.
I made an account on kbin but it isn’t vibing yet. So far, both this and lemmy.ml as well as Tildes have been the ones to step so far in this early period of trying new things out.
It got popular and lost its sense of community. It used to be common, even in large subreddits, to see someone’s username and recognize it again on another subreddit on the site. I made friends this way. It was sometimes less common, but you sometimes would see someone you knew IRL – do you let them know?
Once karma became a currency, sometimes exchanged for real currency to buy influence, that’s when Reddit started changing. Like many things, it fell for commercialization.
Only a couple years ago, a friend of mine was at the top of reddit with a family photo he took. He eventually deleted it because of all the ugliness that inevitably comes from a huge thread where an adult woman and child are in it.
It used to not be that way.
Apollo is the epitome of Apple’s HIG. Quite literally the best designed app from a UX standpoint on the App Store.
I remember just falling in love with the design that day. I gave Christian money as soon as I could. I had been an Alien Blue user beforehand. And I just remember being so blown away by the speed of everything too.
I was planning on staying on Reddit until I lost the ability to use Boost, but it already feels too far gone, and I’m struggling to find anything engaging on there. End of an era indeed :(
I thankfully spend a good 90% of my Redditing on Desktop (old.reddit.com 4lyfe), but losing Boost on my phone hurts. Just spent the last hour hitting up all my most frequent subs and looking for all their discords or any alternate *anythings *they’ve set up regardless lol
Boost was the Android Reddit client I used the most. I thought it was great. I also liked Sync a bunch too. I paid for both and would rotate between them. But something about Apollo just stuck with me.
Wow, the fact Reddit is claiming he’s blackmailing them for 10 million dollars is insane.
The fact the dev recorded it and posted it online for people to listen to themselves is great. God I love living in Ontario Canada where it’s a single party consent to record others on the phone.
I live in South Korea where it’s also legal to record only with single party consent. It’s not that long ago that I found out that it’s not a universal thing. It should be.
Where isn’t it single party consent?
https://recordinglaw.com/party-two-party-consent-states/
Here’s just the US. There’s up to 13 states with all party consent depending on how you define it.
TIL.
I always thought it was nearly all one party.
Well, it sort of is nearly all one party.
Why do people keep mentioning apollo? It sucks. There are actually good 3rd party reddit apps
It’s not my favorite but I can see the passion of the dev in my app. It’s not fair to discount the whole thing because you think it sucks.
The changes of the api affects every 3rd party reddit app. Apollo is one of the least good ones. Focusing on the bad app is shitting on everyone who puts all of their passion into the good apps
Curious as to why you think Christian doesn’t put passion into Apollo?
What things about Apollo don’t you like?
Making foss is driven by passion. Making proprietary software is driven by passion for making money. One of these passions are not driven by greed. Guess which one. Also, guess which kind of software I prefer. I will never understand itoddlers
So if it’s rude when others call you names, how would you categorize what you just did?
you are the only person i have ever heard express that opinion.
First time I have heard this take… are you actually spez?
I use 3rd party reddit apps that don’t suck. Stop calling me names. Rude
I used to use Alien Blue and then moved to Apollo and it was good enough for me. Id ask what app(s) you used but I don’t really care about reddit apps anymore 🤷♂️ Unless they upgrade to work with Lemmy
Which I really hope they do! I’m not really sure how much work it would take to pivot over, but I would pay for Apollo again if it would help haha.
Redreader will work with both reddit and in the future also lemmy
Sure perhaps it’s not the best but for iOS it’s as close to a native app experience as possible, and ad free.
Yeah, I think possibly people don’t like swift ui and how that all looks tbf. After moving to iOS from Android it is a little bland compared to Material You.
You have to pay 5 dollars a month to make posts. Pathetic
I think it’s just that it’s the most popular one on IOS, and a lot of the android ones are android only? And it was the first one whose story got picked up by the media.
Idk. I’ve never used it. But every app that isn’t RedReader is clearly inferior, what are ya’ll doing? /joke
This is just one of those harmless areas where opinions differ.
Sad news. I use Boost which I love. But won’t be using Reddit anymore once 3rd party apps are cut off.
Same. There was a post on the boost subreddit indicating this place, so I expect there will be an influx (eg, me).
😊👍. I’m looking at it like home is where the heart is. And my heart just isn’t into Reddit pulling this stunt.
If you’re here and you have the technical skills, please consider running your own instance. Beehaw and lemmy.ml are getting slammed.
As an addition, this list can be interesting for potential new joiners looking for a smaller instance to register https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances
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kbin looks nice, though this is the first I’m hearing of it 🧐
Skills and resources. The fact that Beehaw is slammed with only 451 users per day shows that running a Lemmy instance is pretty compute-intensive, so you’ll need some beefy hardware.
Are there any hosting providers for Lemmy yet, like Masto.host and Spacebear offer for other federated software?
There’s at least one mad scramble going on to create one. Probably several.
Would love to know if/when it happens
I do but dunno if I have the time or energy, as it would not only be the tech part, you’d have to also moderate the place yourself and I’m very averse to do that sort of thing again
That’s really my main concern too. Also, I am already on call at my day job, I’d rather not sign up to do that for a passion project too.
One thing I’ve thought of is trying to set up a an instance that mirrors some subreddits via RSS. No comments though, because API access.
If you don’t have time or energy, but do have money, consider donating to this instance or others that vibe with what you’re looking for! 💜
I’m working on getting my instance up and running. I’m worried that by the time I do, I’ll get slammed with new account registrations and won’t be able to get things running smoothly.
¯\_ (ツ)_/¯Are there docs or docker containers out there already for this? Anyone with an unraid server could be offloaded to their own instances if it gets published in their community apps store (it just needs a config file to make it work on there IIRC).
There’s actually an Ansible playbook for it, that will deploy Docker containers. It’s pretty easy. Edit some configs, run the playbook and boom!
This is really sad. I rarely posted on Reddit, and I mostly use it as an information source, but Apollo is how I mostly interacted with the platform, and when I did post, it was always through Apollo.
One silver lining is I found Beehaw as a result, and I like interacting and posting here, so I guess… thanks for being shit Reddit!
God, I feel so bad for Christian. What a slap in the face….
Indirectly in the face of every user
You’re not wrong. A little more impactful for Christian though considering the time and effort he put in to arguably the best Reddit experience outside of old.reddit. Oh well… time for a new kid on the block.
“Swallow all your morals. They’re a poor man’s quality.” - spez, probably
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completely off topic but great pfp 👍🏾
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Haha I literally just came from that post! I left the app, downloaded lemmy, made an account, and apparently get to pick up right where I started.
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Lemigration
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Begun, the migration has.
