someone is working on a reddit api compatibility shim so reddit apps could connect to Lemmy without redesigning their apps

https://github.com/derivator/tafkars/tree/main/tafkars-lemmy

“Tafkars stands for “The API formerly known as…”, is written in Rust and is pronounced like “tough cars”. Tafkars is an API proxy that allows apps to talk to Lemmy through a familiar API from a kinder time. The hope is that this will make it easy for app developers to support Lemmy with only minimal code changes.” @fediverse

  • bdonvr@lemmy.rogers-net.com
    14·
    1 year ago

    I don’t think an unmodified Reddit app would be able to effectively browse the fediverse no matter how good a translation API is, but it could mean a lot LESS work for an app designer making a lemmy app.

    • zalack@lemmy.ml
      1·
      1 year ago

      What would the hurdles be for normal, non-mod users? Once you sign up for an instance, isn’t serving content from all and letting users subscribe to communities pretty much the same flow? I don’t see why the fact that these “subs” are on different servers couldn’t be transparent to the client.

      The client I use – Relay – doesn’t even have a sign up flow, and I suspect could transparently serve Lemmy content with a good translation API.

    • Einar@lemmy.ml
      5·
      1 year ago

      Hey. Don’t dis my first love. 😊

      I still have Infinity installed and will miss it sorely. It has some features Jerboa is still missing. But I am hoping some of these 3rd party devs will find a love for Lemmy. If Lemmy can hold a growing community.

    • maynarkh@lemmy.ml
      1·
      1 year ago

      Better have a smorgasbord of different apps, it’s great if we can get a decent competition going.

    • zalack@lemmy.ml
      2·
      1 year ago

      God I hope so. No knock against the developers, because it’s a young app and they are improving it almost every day, but Jerboa is really hard to use coming from Relay.

      u/DBrady just has excellent UX/UI design sense.

      • Moonguide@lemmy.ml
        3·
        1 year ago

        Kind of, in the sense that once populations booms, there could be many communities covering the same topic. Which has both upsides and downsides.

        • thisn@feddit.de
          7·
          1 year ago

          I guess this will be sorted out by itself, as people will be joining the most active communities regarding a topic - at one point the least actice communities of a topic will “die” out.

        • pcouy@sh.itjust.works
          4·
          1 year ago

          Since I’ve joined lemmy, I’ve been thinking about some kind of “community merging” feature.

          A “meta community” would be able to “follow” other communities across the fediverse and posts from followed communities would show up in the “meta community’s” feed. Posts from followed communities would remain on their original instances, or they could be duplicated to the meta community’s instance.

          There are a lot of details to work out, but I think this would add a lot more usability to lemmy and the fediverse as a whole

    • icesentry@lemmyrs.org
      1·
      1 year ago

      Couldn’t they just treat them as subreddits? Subs are essentiallly their own communities already

    • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
      1·
      1 year ago

      You could cheat and return subreddits like r/fediverse@lemmy.ml but that’d probably break some clients that validate subreddit names. You could also try to encode stuff (i.e. r/fediverse__lemmy_ml, replacing __ with @ and _ with .) but then you’d quickly run into the length limit. Same for usernames.