Wow the enshittification is at full throttle across silicon valley! Guess those investors gotta get those returns now that interest rates are spiking!

Yeah that makes sense! I totally agree! Search is becoming pretty difficult these days!

API calls are almost always private between the caller and the endpoint (think telegram bots or mobile apps). There isn’t really a technically feasible way for a crawler to somehow “infer” any kind of knowledge of how api calls are being used unless the result has some kind of publically visible side effect (E. G. The program using the api is generating a web page and uploading it somewhere crawlable). Google et Al go by how many links from other pages to the page of interest exist (inbound links) and multiply by a smattering of other things like quality of keywords, length of content etc.

That said, if you’re implying that the api changes mean that:

• people are less likely to use reddit because they can’t access it via RIF/Apollo
• less useful content is added to the site to be indexed,
• fewer inbound links will be generated that point to existing posts
• pages stagnate and drop in ranking

That is a plausible concern.

I think IPFS often unfairly gets lumped in with crypto bro shite but it seems to me like a pretty useful technology in many other contexts too.

I think it’s a fair concern. We’ve seen other parts of the fediverse successfully implement crowd sourced funding via patron and similar to keep mastodon servers running and I suspect if Lemmy remains “the place to be” admins will have reasonable success with a similar model. Lemmy is super efficient and can support 100s of users on a single box so I think if 1% of users paid like $5 a month you could probably still support 99% of users “for free”.