I think now is a great time to remind everyone, like sync’s developer, Lemmy’s developers need to be paid too! The amount of time all the devs put into making lemmy exist, in my opinion, should be worth some of your money. If you can afford it, donating to the people who develop lemmy and/or the people keeping your home instance up will accelerate the incredible growth of lemmy!
There’s nothing wrong with charging for API access if the price is reasonable. Reddit was intentionally unreasonable to kill off 3rd party traffic. In 2022, the avg reddit user brought in $0.72 USD per year. If they charged just $1/yr, they’d increase their profit!
Hell, I would even dare say, the best way to do it is to have the API be free up to a certain usage, at which point it becomes paid. Then the price scales down as you get even more and more usage.
This allows newcomers to the app space to get their footing, and punishes people trying to automate vote bots while rewarding established devs.
Yes I know, it was just pretty funny that the first comment I saw was about a paid 3rd party app not paying for access, when this was one of reddit’s “official” reasons for the changes.
Exactly, this is something I see people not talk about as much. Charging for API access is not new and actually reasonable. Handling API calls costs money after all. The issue was the intentionally ridiculous price.