I usually don't get too salty about these things, but that seemed uncalled for, especially since I'm on their side.
You’re directly involved in the project according to the comments so a ban for self promo is justified here
This is true, but I would have thought that removing the comments with a warning would have sufficed. A ban seems excessive.
I would agree for a first offense but we're only seeing OP's side of the story. There might be history or context that OP isn't including because it would be less sympathetic (which is literally the only reason to make this post).
Self-Promos tend to be insta-ban due to how spammed and intrusive they used to be and still are. It's one of those "everyone gets the same treatment" situations.
Hmm... That does not bode well for my hopes that Apollo would support Lemmy in the future. It could have been one of his mods and not the dev himself, though.
Yep, that is possible.
well, I saw your comment and made it here, so at least one happy customer was served.
Kind of short-sighted by Christian to do this. He could put up an instance, make an Apollo update (not trivial) and migrate a bunch of users onto Lemmy. Getting a decent percentage of Apollo users over here would be good for a producer of a popular app based client. I'd wager operating his own instance would end up being cheaper than Reddit's API fees. He could even benefit from donations to keep his servers running.
Everybody wins in this hypothetical, magical, free business idea.
Sweet, glad to have you.
I don't mind the ban too much as I don't use reddit often, but it's probably indicative that the developer plans to stay with reddit. Our door is always open to him if he changes his mind tho.
I mean, yeah. You broke the self-promotion rule. It's a kind of a dumb rule IMO. "You're allowed to promote things, but just not your things.". Someone other than you promoting Lemmy wouldn't be breaking the rules.
So, there's no real mystery here.
Plenty of other comments mentioned Voat and Lemmy ... weird https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_call_with_reddit_to_discuss_pricing_bad/jmd4wk8/
Maybe the difference is the fact that Dessalines is directly involved in the Lemmy project. Maybe that makes it self promotion in the Apollo dev's eyes? 🤷
I don't understand people's issue with self-promotion. If it's unhelpful, i.e. spam? Sure, nobody wants to try something completely irrelevant or broken. That's because it's irrelevant or broken.
If you've put a lot of work into something, especially for free, which solves someone's problem; I think you have every right to shout it from the roof tops?
It's not like anyone was spamming about Lemmy before people had an issue with Reddit. I had to go hunting to find it months ago.
The problem when you allow this is that sooner or later the sub is only self promotion and you can't find anything relevant anymore.
Yeah, maybe it's difficult to enforce with nuance and not have people get angry about it.
I have found some great projects through self-promotion and I haven't had to moderate it so I might have a soft spot for it.
No self promotion is a very simple quality filter. Pretty much everyone is proud of something they made, but finding someone else that also is willing to promote it is much harder. By blocking self promotion they're setting a low bar that needs to be cleared where you have to find someone else to vouch for you. That said, once at least one other person has posted about it you should be allowed to post as well since you've effectively cleared that bar at that point.
People are a lot more likely to promote their own products if they're allowed to than to promote someone else's work, and it quickly becomes spammy of people talking about their own "superior" projects. I fully agree that this is great though, but I get where christain was coming from removing it from his post
That would be a little like the staff on the sinking Titanic reminding passengers not to mention other cruise lines :p
Self-promotion rules are really weird for open-source projects too. Its like we're telling people about a pizza recipe that we created and are sharing freely... we're not selling anything or trying to profit off people.
I thought Voat was mostly defunct now.
It is. Shut down in 2020.
Boat is a sad story. The site itself was very good. When Reddit purged their worst subs and users, they all went to Voat. Predictably it became extremely toxic.
That could have been avoided by establishing a counter-culture there, but it seems that this has not been tried well enough. It's still sad to see the decline of alternatives to almost every large website out there.
They probably have a blanket ban on promoting competing Reddit clients, and didn't bother to figure out what Lemmy was.
Perhaps, although I was pretty clear in that thread that lemmy is a reddit replacement, not an apollo one.
Exactly. There's a note that says "Self-promo -- Lemmy" right in the posted screen cap.
Which is (technically) true.
r/redditalternatives wasn't banned yet, so try to post there
This would be a more fitting sub.
A ban for first offense seems excessive, but to be fair, this whole situation must be quite stressful for them and being asked by hundreds of users for support of X or Y alternative seems like it would quickly become annoying.
Really really hoping it wasn’t the dev himself. That would be so disheartening.
Someone will have to ask them about it. Tell them I'd like to have good relations with them.
He has a mastodon, can you tag him here through that? Might be easier to get his attention that way vs. through reddit @dessalines@lemmy.ml
I'll give the benefit of the doubt that they don't know what lemmy is and assumed it is just spam.
Sync > all Reddit clients anyways ^j/k pls don't ban^
But seriously though, plenty of posts about Lemmy on the Sync sub. Would be interesting to see if the dev responds though.
the mods of apollo has something against lemmy?
I read some comments by them today. They are really trying not to burn bridges with reddit in fear that talks over pricing will cease. I could see how removing comments would make sense to them in that light.
honestly reddit has been in decline for years, I really hope the fediverse continues to expand that's the only way to put a stop to enshittification
I agree. But like Twitter alternatives, two things are required. Products that that have feature parity and quick mass adoption.
I have seen it happen twice to large sites. MySpace to Facebook. That happened fast. Then I saw digg to Reddit.
Both those cases Facebook and Reddit respectively had feature parity(ones that mattered) if not more features. But as a heavy digg user, I still struggled with Reddit.
Mastodon has struggled to get wide adoption and people are still using Twitter so I am not sure it will ever happen.
I think if Lemmy wants to succeed and take market share from Reddit, the mobile apps need to greatly improve in the next month. I am not shitting on any of the current apps but they aren’t remotely close to having parity with RIF or Apollo. And that makes sense as those apps are really mature.
Not sure, don't think that dev has responded yet.
Maybe a stupid question from a Newb here such as myself, but are there currently any good 3rd party clients for Android and iOS that support Lemmy? I’ve been looking around here using the browser and this platform has promise, but being able to use clients like Apollo, Sync for Reddit, etc, would really make it more useful in my opinion.
The official list is an https://join-lemmy.org/apps , but the main iOS one (remmel) is currently abandoned, so we're updating that page soon.
There's a new iOS app being developed by @davidbures@mstdn.social called Mlem.
I made an android one, called Jerboa.
Great work! Just joined Lemmy today, and downloaded Jerboa from F-Droid (currently replying to you using your app, no less). Checking my profile seems to be broken, but otherwise seems to be working great.
EDIT: Actually, seems to be working now. Maybe the profile breaks if it has no content?
Seems like someone is ready to lock their app behind an even pricier subscription. I can't understand how people go above and beyond to defend him
The dev pretty clearly stated that it isn't an issue of mandating a subscription, because even with one the API pricing is too high for it to make sense.
I’m all for promoting lemmy but I have to say I don’t see an issue here. Self-promotion is a well recognised no no.
Fingers crossed Christian does migrate Apollo to lemmy some day but he’s probably suffering from whiplash - this has all happened very quickly. I expect he needs a break.