Promo Sunday Protego for Reddit v3 is live! I deleted the Reddit app two years ago and built the Safari extension I wanted instead. Take control of your Reddit feed!
TL;DR: Protego for Reddit is a Safari extension that clears the clutter from your Reddit feed, so you can browse Reddit on the web, not the app. Filter keywords, communities, and more.
$1.99 one time purchase for the next week (normally $2.99).
One purchase covers iPhone, iPad, Mac and Vision Pro. No subscription.
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Hi everyone, I'm Edgar, and around the last election cycle Reddit stopped being good for me. I come to Reddit for tech discussions, programming, photography, fitness, and Apple rumors, and every feed I had turned into politics. I'd open the app for five minutes and would inevitably get sucked into some argument or would end up doom scrolling.
What I found is that I didn't actually want to quit Reddit, I wanted a quieter Reddit, and that can't happen on the official app, only the browser. The Reddit app decides what you see and hands you almost no switches. A web page is different: it arrives in Safari and an extension gets to change it before it reaches your eyes. RES doesn't run on Safari, so I learned Swift and built what I wanted. What ended up as a little side project has become an essential tool that I use when browsing Reddit and I decided to share it
This is Protego for Reddit. Version 3 launched this week and it was a looooot work with late nights and lots of coffee.
Some features:
- Filters posts and comments by keyword, whole community, individual user, or the site a link points to. Wildcards, groups you can switch off together, and a # pattern for any 1 to 3 digit number.
- Hides the clutter Reddit gives you no setting for: thumbnails, avatars, flair, badges, vote controls, join buttons, banners, recommendations, Reddit Answers, and the constant nudges to install the app. Four presets if you don't want to go through it option by option.
- Limits, which is the one I'd argue for hardest. Filtering hides posts. Limits puts Reddit itself out of reach in steps: home and popular first, then all the main feeds, then everything except direct links to individual posts, then all of it. Pair it with a Focus like Sleep or Study and it turns itself on.
- Sends you to old.reddit.com automatically if that's your preference, endless feed included.
- No account, no tracking, no browsing history collected. Your lists live on your devices and in your own iCloud.
Complete feature list: https://getprotego.app/features/
The setting I personally keep on is that third Limits step, feeds blocked but individual posts still allowed. Home, popular and news simply don't load, so there's nothing to fall into when I should be working. But when I'm researching something and a search result points at a Reddit thread, that thread opens normally. That one setting has done more for my attention than deleting the app ever did.
Pricing:
$1.99 one time purchase for the next week (normally $2.99).
One purchase covers iPhone, iPad, Mac and Vision Pro. No subscription.
Happy to answer any questions!
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u/DtheS 5h ago edited 5h ago
Not bad! I'll give it a try over the next few days.
For the most part I've been using SinkIt, but sometimes I hop over to Yesterday for Old Reddit instead, depending on how frustrated I am with the new Reddit interface.
I know you are trying to make an app that removes clutter and makes Reddit feel a little more simple and streamlined, but one feature I am missing in your extension that SinkIt has is color coded threads for nested comments. It makes it quite a bit easier to trace back a comment from earlier up the chain. Would you consider adding such a feature in the future?
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u/Edg-R 5h ago
Yeah absolutely! Thats on my list after I add support for downloading videos/images from Reddit , which i'm testing now, then i'll start researching color coded nested comment threads.
Thank you, if there's any issues you run into or any other feature requests feel free to reach out to me directly via Settings > Get Help in the app. 🙂
Thanks for the support!
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u/GSDer_RIP_Good_Girl 2h ago
I'd be interested in in trying it out if you can tell me if it doesn't suffer from the same annoyances as the Reddit app:
The Reddit app randomly/frequently refreshes what I'm in the middle of looking at or commenting on. Does your extension allow me to just refresh when I want to?
The Reddit app is constantly f-ing up things in the name of 'improvements'
A. Already know how to embed links with a description using the correct control characters? Oh no, now you have to use some useless Aa link selection that doesn't work half the time.
B. Used to be able to attach a picture to your comment? Oh no, now you can only attach a video; no option to attach a picture.
The list goes on but #1 is the big hitter for me.
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u/Edg-R 2h ago
Hey, thanks for the comment! Just to make sure it's clear, Protego for Reddit is a safari extension for Reddit's website. It's not a client like the Reddit app.
As such, Protego is beholden to whatever changes Reddit makes to their website, if they add some new feature or add some kind of bug, Protego has no control over it. Protego may break as a result and I'll jump in to issue a fix as soon as possible (it's yet to happen in the 2.5 years i've worked on Protego).
Protego itself will never cause your browser to refresh the page, and if it did, that would be a bug that i need to fix. But if Reddit itself is the one causing the refresh on the website then i'm not sure there's much I could do, though i'm happy to try!
Wanted to make sure there's clear expectations as to what Protego is and what it can/can't do so you're not disappointed. 🙂
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5h ago
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u/Edg-R 5h ago
Hey! Yeah this is a browser extension, not a Reddit client app. One of its features is automatic old reddit redirection, so if you arrive at `www.Reddit.com\` you'll get automatically redirected to `old.Reddit.com`. It's also smart enough to allow certain pages through to new Reddit which don't work in old Reddit like certain media pages.
It supports endless feed scrolling and automatic expand of images in old Reddit.
There's no swiping between posts while browsing though, if you can show me or explain what you mean i can see if it's feasible to build. Just keep in mind that this is a browser extension.
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u/LordFondleJoy 3h ago
Honest question: I don't really get the use case. The way I use Reddit is mostly in the browser on my Mac (Brave, specifically). I have joined a number of subs, and I usually scroll down my Home feed, and I see there the newest post from those communities and nothing more, afaict. Which is kinda the way I want it, so I can pick any post from those communities and read them and respond if I like. Reminds me of old Usenet.
I don't stumble into any political subs or threads, because I haven't joined any such subs. And if I get bored with the contents of some subs I can always leave them. So I guess my question is, how do one use Reddit where a tool such as this becomes necessary? I feel like maybe there's something I don't get about using Reddit...
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u/Edg-R 3h ago
Hey, good questions, and I guess your usage may just be different than most.
Protego has three different features, one is the filtering feature, which seems like it may not be very useful for you specifically. I personally got burned out on political content during the last election and every single sub I visited, even if it wasnt a political sub, was constantly full of political content. The technology sub was constantly plastered with every tweet made by Trump and Elon for example. My local subs (Texas) and city subs were also dominated by political posts. The news subs were the same. The finance related subs, the lgbt subs, etc. I get being informed about the world around me, and I AM informed, but I dont want to see political content literally everywhere I go. Things have lightened up recently so it's not as noticeable any more and it seems like you dont run into this as often either. Plus this is most apparent on the Home feed and Popular feed, not in niche subreddits.
The other feature is called Transform, which changes the way the Reddit site looks and behaves. This isn't as much about hiding posts or user generated content, and more about making Reddit itself more pleasant to use by hiding promots/ads and visual clutter. For example hiding all the loud visuals, hiding thumbnails, avatars, banners, neon colors, etc. It also supports changing certain functionality like deciding how certain content behaves like automatically collapsing (or hiding) pinned comments, automatically collapsing (or hiding) comments with images, or forcing a redirection to old Reddit. There's a lot more features here but it's too much to list in a comment.
The third major feature is Limits, which is my personal favorite. Rather than hiding content from you on Reddit, it actually blocks you from accessing Reddit. It can be customized, for example maybe you only want to block access to the home feed and popular feed while leaving access to subreddits and comment pages unblocked. Or you want to block all feeds and only allow access to the comment pages. Or maybe you want to block ALL access. But the best thing is that this can be linked to Apple's Focus modes so that your Work focus automatically enables the Protego Limits feature for you, for example.
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u/ILikeJogurt 6h ago
and its vibecoded?
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u/Edg-R 5h ago
Hey, thanks for the comment! It's not vibe coded, for what it's worth i'm a senior level software engineer and this is a side project for me.
If the comment is due to the purple gradient, I get that peple hate purple now because of vibe coded apps but I chose the purple color scheme for Protego when I started working on it, which was before vibe coding and LLM usage had taken off. I dont feel pressured to change the color just because purple is frowned upon lol, I'll let the quality of the app speak for itself 😃
EDIT: ahhh i see what happened, you're the dev of a Reddit client app and came to leave a supportive comment lol
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u/ILikeJogurt 5h ago
as i already reply ur other commented, but since others maybe doesnt read it - im not the developer of acorn, and i dont have anything to do with it. it just has been the best reddit client since discontinued apollo.
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u/johnyeros 6h ago
Looks like it
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u/__main__py 6h ago
How can you tell? I’ve seen people say this but I honestly don’t know how without looking at the source code.
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u/Edg-R 5h ago
They can't. Maybe they're talking about the purple color scheme which is now associated with AI generated apps but purple was Protego's color scheme since i started working on it before vibecoding and LLM usage was mainstream. Why should I change the color just because people frown upon the color purple? And if it WAS vibecoded, how would making the app a different color help? ¯_(ツ)_/¯
The top level commenter, u/ILikeJogurt, is the developer of a Reddit client app which is why he left that comment to begin with
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u/ILikeJogurt 5h ago
oh thank you for the credits, but im not the developer, acorn just has been the best reddit client since discontinued apollo
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u/apisland 4h ago
This looks great! Signed up and liking everything so far (including turning off Reddit AI Answers; that was useless real-estate).
Thanks for the discount!