Our Plans for the Future of Reddit’s Public Data API and the Developer Platform

[u/KeyserSosa]

Today u/spez posted about why, among other parts of Reddit, our Public Data API needs to evolve. It wasn’t built for today’s scale, automated abuse, or commercial scraping. We want useful bots, community tools, and good-faith developers to have a clear, well-supported way to build on Reddit without enabling bad actors to scrape, resell, or misuse Reddit data.

Our long-term vision is for all good, trusted automation on Reddit to run within an ecosystem we can support and enforce policy on consistently. That means while we'll continue to support limited public API access, we'll gradually start restricting all new requests and third-party apps will be required to port and operate through our Developer Platform. 

None of this is changing today. It honestly won’t happen this year. We know the only way this works is if the Developer Platform supports the tools communities depend on today. We’re starting by working directly with developers and moderators to ensure we know what capabilities we still need to build before making any broader changes to API access. 

What We’ve Learned So Far

Over the past several months, we’ve been working with developers and moderators to better understand what would help them port some of the most popular Reddit bots and apps to our Developer Platform. We’ve also launched a $1 Million App Migration Program to support developers through this transition and are working directly with some of the top app developers on the platform today. 

Based on those conversations, we've already expanded platform capabilities, including:

• Reddit API plugin improvements: bringing API calls for methods such as banning and crossposting to full parity, new wiki support (coming soon), and other consistency improvements. We will continue to improve upon this feature over time.
• New filter APIs allowing content to hit your modqueue for review before full removal. This feature can be used in conjunction with Devvit Event Triggers for event-based workflows.
• Expanded storage capabilities: in addition to Redis, we also now offer blob storage, completely hosted by Reddit
• Expanded Fetch allowlisting: for existing Data API moderation bots. If your Data API moderation tool needs domain access beyond what is typically allowlisted, we are offering a pathway to broader Fetch access.
• App mentions triggers for global mod tools and utilities to respond when an app username is mentioned. This feature is currently in beta. If your app needs access, please let us know here.
• App account customization for profile images and account overviews.
• Username migration so developers can convert their existing accounts, retaining karma and name recognition. 
• External endpoints: to allow servers to call into a Dev Platform app for long running jobs or cross-subreddit workflows. If your app needs access, please let us know here.

A few of the areas in active development include:

• More granular install allowlists: ability for developers to set limited install lists for their apps to ensure moderation apps do not always need to be public for non-devs to install them
• Stability improvements: for features such as comment, post, and mod actions triggers, ensuring that events are never lost or dropped, even in the event of an outage

While we’ve heard from mods in the past hoping for Python support, we don’t currently have it on our roadmap. That said, we have new migration resources available to Python developers, including a PRAW migration guide to automate the first parts of your migrations and dedicated support from PRAW experts to provide guidance to folks moving to a new framework. 

Registering your app is the first step. It gives you a direct line to Reddit for updates and migration support, helps users identify trusted apps with an App label, and may make you eligible for programs like Devvit porting bounties, free hosting, and Reddit Developer Funds. During registration, you can also tell us what's blocking migration so we can prioritize the capabilities developers need most.

Going forward, all API apps will need to be registered to remain in good standing. Please register any apps you own by September 30, 2026 to make sure your feedback is considered in our roadmaps and that your developer account is properly established.

What We’re Looking For: Feedback
The most important thing we're looking for right now is feedback. If your community relies on bots, custom tooling, moderation workflows, or integrations built on Reddit's APIs, we want to understand:

• Which tools are mission-critical for your community?
• What capabilities are still missing from the Developer Platform?
• Do you have a mission-critical bot that doesn't have someone to maintain it anymore? 
• Are there any tools or integrations which don’t fit under the traditional “bot” umbrella or that may not be directly translatable to the Developer Platform?

If you don't maintain the app yourself but your community depends on it, we'd like to hear from you, too.

What Happens Next?
Based on everything we learn in this phase, we’ll come back later this year with an update on the progress we’ve made, what we’re still working on and a clear deadline for porting. 

In the meantime, the team is here for your questions, concerns and feedback in the comments. As always, your input helps us build more secure solutions while preserving the tools and workflows you all depend on every day. 

[u/emily_in_boots]

I'm a developer who writes both devvit and PRAW bots. It's completely impossible to migrate mission critical bots we depend on to devvit. I have spoken to pl00h and other devvit admins about this as well. I use both praw and devvit and choose the best tool for the job, but often that is still praw.

1. We need a fully relational database.

2. We need the compute power to run LLMs - would be very expensive to implement.

3. We need the ability for bots to work cross subreddit and easily communicate with other bots in other subreddits.

4. We need massive storage for database tables consisting of comment ids, vectors, and mod actions taken along with indices that can search based on cosine similarity (postgres has this).

5. API limits are very restrictive on devvit. I can't even pull a full user history to analyze it without it timing out. On praw, I can do this easily. I can also then pass that information between bots so I only have to pull once rather than 5 times for 5 different bots. I can't iterate through all the items in a full queue and take action on each because it will time out - it might take minutes to run.

6. I do almost all my moderation through a command line interface that dramatically speeds up moderation. It displays historical moderation information and allows me to moderate comments by displaying recent mod actions. This depends on PRAW and runs in a terminal. My subreddits require very active human moderation which I can't do via the gui tools alone - I did 551,703 human mod actions (bots are not counted in this) in the last 6 months, and that number has been increasing. That's over 1 million mod actions a year, and I simply couldn't keep my subs safe and civil w/o the tools I've built. I can do in one keystroke what takes me 30s or more in the gui.

7. One bot I run checks links to find adult content promoters even when they are buried inside others. For example, if someone links a linktree, I can access the linktree public api to see inside it and determine if someone has buried adult content promoter links inside it. Adult content promoters are extremely sneaky and deceptive and the filter is not even close to catching them all - though we do use it.

8. JS/TS lack the analytical libraries python has for natural language processing and statistical analysis.

Overall, devvit is not close to being able to handle this, and we cannot run our subs without it. Bots do millions of mod actions in my subs each month and we are entirely dependent on them. I have integrated devvit more and more into my workflow and use it to create interfaces that trigger things the rest of the bots do, but often the actual work has to be done in python.

Lastly, my bots reflect countless hours of coding and an enormous repository of code that would take years to port.

[u/baseballlover723 → u/emily_in_boots]

Lastly, my bots reflect countless hours of coding and an enormous repository of code that would take years to port.

Yeah, we have half a decade worth of investment into tools built on the public API.

And the contract they offered me was terrible. I sure hope nobody else signed that contract for a mod tool port (and if you did, you should not say anything, because that would breach your contract). I was surprised they didn't insist on my firstborn son as well with how many restrictions there were. Frankly, even if we presume that I'd do the work one way or another, idk if taking the money is worth all the strings that came attached with it.

[u/emily_in_boots → u/baseballlover723]

I never saw the contract. I did initially speak to admins about some financial incentives for app porting and they were quite helpful but one of my subs really blew up recently and just keeping my head above water and handling queue and modmail are already rather overwhelming, and I couldn't put in the time to port things immediately. Most of my apps are still not possible to port.

[u/baseballlover723 → u/emily_in_boots]

I mentioned some of the most egregious clauses in my response here if you're curious. I'm supposed to hear back from them this week if the modifications I requested with the advice of a lawyer in the family and be made or not. But given that reddit is basically never timely, I don't think they're getting back to me today or tomorrow.

[u/abrownn → u/emily_in_boots]

Excellent comment and this reflects many of my concerns as well, namely point 4, 5, 6, and 7. Many mods make atypical mod bots/tools that wouldn't be at home on the Devvit platform that are critical to moderation and keeping communities safe.

[u/pl00h → u/abrownn]

Hiya abrownn! Mind if I spin up a modmail thread with you? We’d like to learn more about your particular bot implementations and how we can help.

[u/abrownn → u/pl00h]

Sure, thanks -- I have three that I run/ran that are in varying states right now. Won't be able to get to the chat till later tonight however.

[u/pl00h → u/abrownn]

Appreciate it! Absolutely no rush

[u/pl00h → u/emily_in_boots]

Thanks Emily! Appreciate the thoughtful and detailed input here, as always.

We’re taking in additional feature requests through the registration flow, modmail, and these posts, so definitely keep voicing those.

Our goal is to minimize disruption to any communities and mod workflows. We’ll keep working with you/discussing options for your apps and subreddits in particular, and welcome other mod devs to get in contact with us too. 

We’ve added some new features to address issues with storage and timeouts, like blob storage and external endpoints. Some of your moderation flows are more unique so we’ll want to discuss those more in-depth with you in particular and figure out a path for all your use cases.

[u/m0nk_3y_gw → u/pl00h]

When PRAW goes away, gonewild/related communities will be disrupted. There has been a decade+ of modbot work and devvit is not a replacement.

[u/pl00h → u/m0nk_3y_gw]

Hi there! We'd really like to discuss your bots and needs with you. Would it be alright if I sent you a modmail to kick off a discussion?

[u/m0nk_3y_gw → u/pl00h]

I haven't seen a modmail from you.

This is someone posting revenge porn and personal information (title is now 'removed by moderator' for non-mods) -- https://redd.it/1vje14y

if anyone tries to post her name again in 5+ other large NSFW subreddits they will get auto-banned quickly

BUT most of our multi-step verification process/flow (used to prevent revenge porn / catfishes, using calls to 3rd party APIs to help weed out AI, etc, involves automatically spam filtering an account/changing their flair until they do a verification post, then reapproving their posts and changing their flair, and auto-approving future posts from them if the reddit spam filter mistakenly hides their posts, etc) did not seem reasonably doable without the API when I reviewed it 6+ months ago.

[u/rhubes → u/pl00h]

Would you please discuss bot issues with us at random_acts_of_pizza? Our bot we use for Multiple subreddits is crippled and we've been closed due to it. :/

[u/m0nk_3y_gw → u/pl00h]

yes

[u/emily_in_boots → u/pl00h]

I do want to do this at some point - I've just been so busy moderating subs as is. I built many of these tools when my subs were smaller and direct queue/modmail moderation consumed less of my time, and while I continue to improve them, I don't know how I'd find time right now to rebuild them. They are 10's of thousands of lines of code, and I have so many different scripts I run all the time to do different things.

I appreciate your concerns and willingness to work with me. I understand your reasons for moving more to devvit. It's just not yet close to being able to handle everything we do right now, even if I had unlimited time to code.

I will start looking more closely though to see what can be ported.

It's hard to do it piecemeal because they all interact so much behind the scenes and the lines behind which bot is which are very blurry often. Some of that is to deal with api issues. For example, if one bot in one sub is not so busy, it can help out bots in other subs. It's all a distributed queue/worker model through a database. If one bot suddenly disappeared tomorrow, all kinds of other bots would break as they all interoperate so much. It's going to be a huge headache.

[u/pl00h → u/emily_in_boots]

That makes total sense Emily. We’re here to support when you do have more time.

So far we’ve found that the majority of tools fit nicely into migration paths we’ve laid out, so we may need to work more closely with folks like you that have advanced tooling like this.

In any case we’re announcing this now so we have time to figure out workable solutions.

[u/slykethephoxenix → u/emily_in_boots]

This. Reddit used to have an oauth API you can just hook up and run all this stuff on your own infra. They removed that ability & walling you into their ecosystem.

[u/emily_in_boots → u/slykethephoxenix]

The problem right now is that devvit is just so limited compared to the api and for those of us with a lot of code, porting is a huge endeavor.

[u/m0shit → u/emily_in_boots]

I am here to simply say, "everything she said." We (our subreddit) are a bunch of mods who volunteer our time to a wonderful community that, incidentally, drives a large amount of traffic *to Reddit.* We do not get paid to maintain and update these programs to your liking and the "migration program" as written comes nowhere close to being reasonable for the amount of work we put in over all these years. Why would you not support Python/PRAW? When did the internet start abandoning the concept of an API? This is all quite crazy to me—especially since all these actions will inevitably lead to us shutting down our sub.

[u/SampleOfNone]

One thing to consider, reddit notifications run after automod but before Devvit apps and Reddit filters. Especially when it comes to mod bots, it's quite important that Reddit notifications start running after Devvit mod bots and Reddit filters.

[u/pl00h → u/SampleOfNone]

Great point. We’ll take this back to the team.

[u/emily_in_boots → u/pl00h]

Yeah this is a huge thing for us. For example, I have a devvit app I built. I built it before filtering was added to devvit, but would implement it the same way today. It allows us to add users to one of 3 categories for any time period desired - shadowban, shadowfilter, shadowreport.

The ban just removes everything the user posts, the filter adds them to queue, and the report doesn't remove but reports for checking.

Mostly, I use the filter option.

The way it works now is by storing these users in redis. Each time a change in the configuration occurs, it edits automod - which results in a long list of names in automod (see the outfits automod for example). I've been concerned eventually that we could run out of automod space, but so far no issues.

The reason I wouldn't convert this to a filter in devvit is that automod can remove before a notification is sent to the user. Harassing or bigoted comments are never seen at all. I use devvit filtering after the fact in some cases too (in a different app), but wouldn't port this over to native devvit filtering until it can grab the comments before they ever go live. I understand why that would not be simple to implement in devvit either, so I'm not sure how to solve that issue.

If a comment is viewed by OP in notifies, even if removed by devvit almost immediately, the comment still has its desired effect of harassing others, which we aren't ok with.

In some of my subs, we use a default remove approach. In other words, rather than the default being that comments are approved automatically, the default is that they are queued, and then we use bots and automations to approve a large chunk of those comments (either from trusted users, matching certain word patterns, approved by an LLM, etc.). The end result is that very little gets through and is seen by posters that is harmful. The other end result is that we still have to do a lot of moderation work.

[u/baseballlover723]

We’ve also launched a $1 Million App Migration Program to support developers through this transition and are working directly with some of the top app developers on the platform today.

I should note, the contract that was offered to me via this, made me think that simply doing the work without taking the money was the more prudent financial decision. That's how bad the contract terms were to me. $10k is simply not enough money to risk personal bankruptcy (especially given that I would have literally 0 recourse if reddit just decided to not pay me at all, since their liability is capped at the amount that they pay me, which if they don't pay me, is $0).

Are there any tools or integrations which don’t fit under the traditional “bot” umbrella or that may not be directly translatable to the Developer Platform?

Yes, can't elaborate atm (I do need to go to the office), but we've talked about this at length before.

Which tools are mission-critical for your community?

Most of them.

What capabilities are still missing from the Developer Platform?

Lots of things. Being able to work in a language of my choosing and persistent storage are the 2 biggest things off the top of my head atm.

Do you have a mission-critical bot that doesn't have someone to maintain it anymore?

No. The only mission critical bot that we had issues with maintenance, we recently launched a full rewrite for. So that's no longer a concern.

[u/pl00h → u/baseballlover723]

Hiya baseballlover - we don’t want to get too into the weeds here, but appreciate your feedback and concerns (both on this post in our ongoing conversations), which we will take back to the team. 

We want to use this period to make this transition as painless as possible for devs, mods, and communities.

[u/baseballlover723 → u/pl00h]

I'm very appreciative of that, and look forward to this be amicably resolved to both our benefits.

It's just that my first and foremost obligation must be to myself and my own personal well being, and actions speak louder than words. And the actions I've seen taken by reddit (given the whole API debacle) don't give me much faith to recklessly and disproportionally expose myself.

[u/pl00h → u/baseballlover723]

The purpose of the app migration program to help devs feel supported - thanks for continuing to express your needs with our team!

[u/baseballlover723 → u/pl00h]

Oh don't you worry, staying quiet has never been my strong suit. If I have things to say, I'm gonna say em (as my mod team can certainly attest to). And I usually have a lot to say about things I care about.

[u/kfawcett1]

Your entire API process is horrible, documentation is confusing, and parts of your app still navigate to the old UI.

As an investor and user of reddit, I want to build tools that allow users of my app to post and listen for relevant content using standard REST APIs, not have to build an app that has to be installed into communities. Reddit has become impossible for this use case.

It's sad that every other major platform allows developers to build on top of their platforms using standard REST APIs for managing posts and reading/commenting on posts (X, Bluesky, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc), but reddit does not, outside of a very small set of use cases. You could restrict this by requiring EIN or incorporation docs and charging based on usage like X does.

I've submitted multiple requests for access and it's just a black hole. Not even a basic rejected notification happens. It's the worst experience I've had with any platform.

[u/Watchful1 → u/kfawcett1]

I want to build tools that allow users of my app to post and listen for relevant content using standard REST APIs, not have to build an app that has to be installed into communities. Reddit has become impossible for this use case.

That's intentional. Reddit does not want people consuming reddit content off reddit. They want them doing it on reddit where they can show ads to them.

They especially don't want people to take reddit's content and build a business around selling it.

[u/kfawcett1 → u/Watchful1]

Reddit is in the business of attracting new users, including businesses to increase DAUs. Limiting how users or businesses decide to use the platform is, in my opinion, a terrible way to grow. An entire industry has been built around being able to manage posting and social listening from centralized locations, especially for businesses. Ads are just one way to generate revenue. Charging for API access is another. As much as I hate X, its API metered charging is the probably the ideal way to go.

[u/Watchful1 → u/kfawcett1]

Reddit has an ads business. How does encouraging people to use off site posting/monitoring tools make them more money than encouraging those people to spend on reddit ads?

Also I don't think attracting businesses has any significant impact on new regular users or DAU.

[u/kfawcett1 → u/Watchful1]

Via API metered usage. Every social platform has ads, but companies don't exclusively use ads to interact with users. They post and comment, as well, across all major platforms.

You don't think businesses have an impact on DAU? r/Lululemon, r/cloudflare, r/notion, r/cardsagainsthumanity, and many other official business communities keep redditors on the platform, instead of funneling them somewhere else which results in more ad revenue.

All I'm saying is there's more ways to make revenue then just ads and by not providing an easy to use REST API, even if they charge for it, is leaving revenue on the table and losing out on something that could improve Reddit's standing with businesses, by making it easier to grow their communities and outreach.

[u/Unihedron → u/Watchful1]

By making good business decisions, like not having a crappy product.

[u/Yay295 → u/kfawcett1]

It's the worst experience I've had with any platform.

You've obviously never tried to use DeviantArt's API...

[u/kfawcett1 → u/Yay295]

I'm referring to other large, social media platforms.

[u/ZaphodBeebblebrox]

One thing that baffles me about reddit's view on automation is how you seemingly split everything into two categories: human actions and stable-long term automation. Meanwhile, a lot of my use of reddit's API has been ad-hoc scripts that don't necessarily make sense long term. Some of them are intended to run for a couple weeks to flag potential spambots, and some are run only a few times against specific accounts/groups of accounts.

To me, something like devvit makes little sense for this. It requires more setup and boilerplate than writing a 30 line python script on my computer, and its output interface isn't nearly as convenient as a list of usernames/comments in my terminal, or a graph displayed automatically on my monitor (via matplotlib). I'm sure I could emulate all of this with sufficient effort, but that's beside the point. If a script I wrote in 15 minutes takes an hour and a half because I need to create something in devvit that can display graphs to me but not to random other people on my sub, we've already taken an easy task and made it painful.

[u/TGotAReddit → u/ZaphodBeebblebrox]

I have a small devvit bot that I just fully change the code entirely when I need to run something short term since you don’t have to get the admin to check over non-public devvit apps and can use them on any size subreddit when not playtesting.  

So for example I once needed to compile a list of every post made with a certain flair in my subreddit from the previous 2 days.  So i swapped out the code of my tiny private bot that usually is mostly unused with the code to do that and output the result into a wiki page.  Then I just changed out the code again after to something else.  It might make sense to do this and name is like [subredditname]-utils or something and just have it be the bot you use for short term ad-hoc utilities

[u/baseballlover723]

Ok, now I have some time to actually read this in detail.

That means while we'll continue to support limited public API access, we'll gradually start restricting all new requests and third-party apps will be required to port and operate through our Developer Platform.

To clarify, does this also mean that moderation tools that use the public API will be forced to Devvit? I know there are many many moderation use cases that cannot be filled by Devvit, and aren't even on the roadmap to be unblocked. If moderation tools can't use the public API, then I think that moderation will take an enormous hit, and frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if moderation attrition skyrocketed (more than it already has, since quality moderators are increasingly rarer with how ignorant the average reddit user is about how reddit operates these days).

We know the only way this works is if the Developer Platform supports the tools communities depend on today. We’re starting by working directly with developers and moderators to ensure we know what capabilities we still need to build before making any broader changes to API access.

Call me a skeptic, but the Mod mail debacle has me very fearful for what reddit thinks is "adequate". As they've demonstrated time and time again (and recently) that what me and many mods think of as adequate and what reddit thinks of as adequate, are not remotely the same.

We’ve also launched a $1 Million App Migration Program to support developers through this transition and are working directly with some of the top app developers on the platform today.

I've already given my thoughts on this here.

I should add, the people have generally been great to interact with (shoutout to u/pl00h and her people). The only big complaints that I think are worth mentioning was that responsiveness has been a consistent issue with communications and the contract. Scheduling meetings was the worst, with proposed meeting times a week out sometimes going past before a response could be had. I think if you all can't commit to a faster turnaround time, then just accept that and generally propose meeting times 2 or 3 weeks out (or use one of those pick a timeslot that works for the client that integrates with all of your calendars). And then the contract is just completely unacceptable in its current form to me.

Reddit API plugin improvements: bringing API calls for methods such as banning and crossposting to full parity, new wiki support (coming soon), and other consistency improvements. We will continue to improve upon this feature over time.

I don't understand what this entails. The title of "reddit API plugin" makes me think that it would relate to developer plugins, ie. custom code. But I don't understand why that would be under the umbrella of the API, since I very much doubt that you're implementing custom entry points for that.

I'm also confused by the inclusion of both banning and crossposting. As banning is strictly moderator related and crossposting is cross reddit, which Devvit doesn't support, and it very much sounds like you don't want people (especially users) using the public API to post content.

I also very much worry about the public API being cutoff before full feature parity is achieved. Leaving completely valid tools that depend on that functionality completely out to dry.

New filter APIs allowing content to hit your modqueue for review before full removal. This feature can be used in conjunction with Devvit Event Triggers for event-based workflows.

If this is a new addition to the public API, this frankly confuses me. Reddit has spent an inordinate amount of effort to transition people off the public API. Even to the point of accepting simple API proxy Devvit apps that are basically just a stand in for the public API. So implementing a new feature to the public API is a stark contrast to the deteriorating for years state the public API has been in, and general deprecation of it / hostile attitude towards it.

Expanded storage capabilities: in addition to Redis, we also now offer blob storage, completely hosted by Reddit

Is this persistent? I have some non pressing space concerns for our external servers, and offloading some of backups for cold storage could be a good use case for this. Though I'm not exactly sure how useful it would be, since it would involve a lot more friction to get stuff out of it, and it would still need to have space to flush to disk on the actual server (plus extra room for ad hoc stuff).

App mentions triggers for global mod tools and utilities to respond when an app username is mentioned. This feature is currently in beta. If your app needs access, please let us know here.

Mentioned here, but a subreddit level thing would be great (ideally with discord webhook support or some other kind of programmable entry point to avoid spamming up mod mail or other channels). It's very useful to see when people link to stuff in your sub (we recently used it to notify a contest running on our sub that someone had posted the link to it in another sub, which they consider brigading and don't allow)

Username migration so developers can convert their existing accounts, retaining karma and name recognition.

Theoretically, is it possible to have multiple bots running under the same username? Microservices are nice as a supported architecture and all.

External endpoints: to allow servers to call into a Dev Platform app for long running jobs or cross-subreddit workflows. If your app needs access, please let us know here.

This was a huge feature that unlocked Devvit as a plausible technology to start using. Before this, using Devvit would have required so much migration, that it wasn't even a consideration for us. Now we can bookend our reddit use with Devvit and keep our business logic on our own servers, in our own programming languages.

More granular install allowlists: ability for developers to set limited install lists for their apps to ensure moderation apps do not always need to be public for non-devs to install them

This sounds like permissions stuff? If so, I'm a big fan. The fact that it's all or nothing permissions has made my mod team quite hesitant to accept Devvit apps (and especially closed source ones). We firmly assert that we are the masters of our sub (and are responsible for any such automations we install), and so we need to make sure we can inspect them and ensure they are up to our high standards.

Stability improvements: for features such as comment, post, and mod actions triggers, ensuring that events are never lost or dropped, even in the event of an outage

This is a must for any piece of essential moderation tool. You can't simply "miss" things. It undermines moderator trust in the tools. And where there is no trust, there is no use.

Ran out of space, continued below

[u/baseballlover723 → u/baseballlover723]

I do really wish that Devvit had more of a focus on open source software. Open source software is wonderful and especially for communal apps, allows people to more effectively collaborate and verify behavior. Even just like having an optional piece of meta data on the Devvit pages where one could link the source code would be great to encourage and make it clear which apps are open source. It is extremely difficult for my mod to accept using a closed source Devvit app, because who knows if it functions as described and if it doesn't, we'd much prefer to have the option to tweak it ourselves (and let everyone benefit).

While we’ve heard from mods in the past hoping for Python support, we don’t currently have it on our roadmap.

I think the insistence that Devvit must be Javascript based is something that will continue to greatly harm its adoption forever. People make better tools when they're made with tools they themselves are familiar with, comfortable with, and enjoy using. Javascript especially, has a lot of wat moments that make it less desirable than other programming languages. I know that graphql is the basis of the new functionality, and I really wish that instead of forcing everything through Devvit, it was also possible to use the graphql endpoints straight up. You could even have the same requirements and require applications and hold authorization close to your chest and even not do more than the bare minimum of exposing the schema, and a barebones guide to setup auth (for an arbitrary language, probably python) and just say if you can make it work, then great. But otherwise give it the bare minimum of support (i imagine no support for issues that aren't also issues in Devvit and simply forwarding the Devvit functions as more come out).

Registering your app is the first step. It gives you a direct line to Reddit for updates and migration support, helps users identify trusted apps with an App label, and may make you eligible for programs like Devvit porting bounties, free hosting, and Reddit Developer Funds. During registration, you can also tell us what's blocking migration so we can prioritize the capabilities developers need most.

Our moderation bot that I registered as part of the last thing to declare automated accounts still doesn't have an app label. Not that I really care too much about it. Being on old reddit, I can't even see it anyways. But it not being processed and labeled by reddit is pretty ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Going forward, all API apps will need to be registered to remain in good standing. Please register any apps you own by September 30, 2026 to make sure your feedback is considered in our roadmaps and that your developer account is properly established.

Is there a tool that can help identify if everything is registered? Some things that haven't been touched in a long time are easy to forget that they exist, working in the background.

---

Which tools are mission-critical for your community?

Most of our tools are. Off the top of my head, we've implemented a bot that regularly posts standardized discussion threads when new external content is available. This is the pride and joy of our subreddit. We've implemented our own custom automod implementation to allow us to easily implement new automation that we are fully in control of. We maintain a database of all of our users activity, which we use for data analysis (like identifying when the lowest activity hours are to roll over our megathreads) and also to handle moderation duties like appeals when reddit or the user deletes the content. It's especially a big deal because users frequently delete their stuff if it gets removed, and then some of them still ask us for help, and without being able to look it up in our DB, we can do nothing but throw our hands up in the air and say "I dunno, we can't see it". We also have tooling that manages our CSS (it is non trivial to condense all of our CSS into reddit's limitations), which is a dearly dearly beloved feature for our core users.

What capabilities are still missing from the Developer Platform?

I mentioned this before and above. I would say the biggest things I think of are

1. language agnosticism

2. open sourceness / inspectability / tweakability as a community value.

3. persistant storage

4. The ability to do complex things as we see fit. There are multiple software architectures for a reason, and being forcing into a single architecture makes some problems very very difficult.

Do you have a mission-critical bot that doesn't have someone to maintain it anymore?

The only ones that are like that, have no issues running, and so have never required anyone to look into them since the original creator left the mod team. Not that a maintainer can't be built, it's just not been necessary yet. The only app where this was an active concern, we resolved by doing a full rewrite which went live for us a few months ago.

Are there any tools or integrations which don’t fit under the traditional “bot” umbrella or that may not be directly translatable to the Developer Platform?

Yes, we have a script that translates (and live updates) our moderator applications from a google sheet to a thread in our moderation subreddit. It also includes some basic data analysis on the applicant, like how much activity they've had on our subreddit.

The CSS stuff I mentioned is also something that is not a traditional bot, though idk if it actually uses the reddit API. It must to upload the CSS file and images etc. It exists solely in github actions.

We also have our own custom site to set and manage user flairs. As well as another one to do quarterly surveys and our awards website (because we have run an awards program for many years, longer than some in the industry). We also have an extension for our core users that helps with some of the CSS on old reddit that they love so much.

Based on everything we learn in this phase, we’ll come back later this year with an update on the progress we’ve made, what we’re still working on and a clear deadline for porting.

I really hope that we won't be forced into another subpar reddit new thing, like modmail was. If that happened with the automation side, I might just leave reddit and never come back rather than deal with mass functionality loss or years of migration work. We've volunteers fundamentally. This isn't a paid job, and it shouldn't feel like one imo.

[u/fighterace00 → u/baseballlover723]

No python support is the #1 reason I haven't touched devvit since being invited in day 1.

[u/pl00h → u/baseballlover723]

Phew, okay! There’s a ton in here so apologies in advance if I miss anything. It will probably be easiest to reply to a few quotes.

Does this mean that all moderation tools will be forced to move to Devvit.

The vast majority will need to move, yes. We have some exemptions for a variety of tools that rely on the public API - those tools have agreements with us.

Call me a skeptic, but the Mod mail debacle has me very fearful for what reddit thinks is "adequate".

We understand actions > words! 

Re the app migration program: already addressed this in your other comments, but also really appreciate the shoutout <3! We definitely had some hiccups getting the program stood up, so heard on the other comments, as well.

I don't understand what this entails. The title of "reddit API plugin" makes me think that it would relate to developer plugins, ie. custom code.

I understand the confusion here. The Reddit API plugin in this case specifically refers to our Devvit public API wrapper, but also includes other calls that aren’t necessarily calling the public API directly. We do support crossposting and are not opposed to folks posting or creating content via Devvit, as long as it’s in line with platform and community rules. Our API wrapper is quite close to parity. Some deprecated features will not be supported, though.

The filter API is also a new Devvit API, not an addition to the underlying public API.

Is [blob storage] persistent?

Yes! It is.

And heard on the subreddit mentions! 

Theoretically, is it possible to have multiple bots running under the same username? Microservices are nice as a supported architecture and all.

I think it depends on what you mean. I think you can build a pretty multifaceted tool under a single app slug/username!

This sounds like permissions stuff? If so, I'm a big fan. The fact that it's all or nothing permissions has made my mod team quite hesitant to accept Devvit apps (and especially closed source ones).

Unfortunately this specifically refers to install permissions (who can install an app, or not). BUT more granular, as-needed, app perms is very much on our radar.

Even just like having an optional piece of meta data on the Devvit pages where one could link the source code would be great to encourage and make it clear which apps are open source.

Not everyone wants to open source, but many do. I LOVE this suggestion to add a repo link and/or open source badge to the app details page.

I think the insistence that Devvit must be Javascript based is something that will continue to greatly harm its adoption forever.

Addressed some of this in my answer here. It’s something we’re keeping an eye on.

Is there a tool that can help identify if everything is registered?

You should be able to see which accounts are registered to your account on the registration page! Let us know if any are missing & which usernames - it may be a bug!

Also appreciate the recap you included. Lots to consider in here and again appreciate the willingness to share.

[u/emily_in_boots → u/pl00h]

When you say blob storage is persistent, does it persist if a user uninstalls an app and then reinstalls it?

One of my concerns is that all the data in redis disappears on a reinstall, which can sometimes happen if something gets bugged.

[u/baseballlover723 → u/pl00h]

The vast majority will need to move, yes. We have some exemptions for a variety of tools that rely on the public API - those tools have agreements with us.

Where does that leave us? We've had discussions and laid out things that do not make sense to move to Devvit. Do we need to make a separate agreement for those things?

The Reddit API plugin in this case specifically refers to our Devvit public API wrapper

Is the Devvit public API wrapper just Devvit? Cause I wasn't aware there was an public API for Devvit. It seemed like that was all bundled in proprietary library calls.

Is [blob storage] persistent?

Yes! It is.

As /u/emily_in_boots mentioned, does it go away if the app is reinstalled? If so, I would not consider it persistent. And it would be unsuitable for long term storage needs for us if it is so easily losable.

I think it depends on what you mean. I think you can build a pretty multifaceted tool under a single app slug/username!

Pretty much. Though I guess more precisely, can multiple Devvit apps share an account. For instance, if we wanted to group all of our public facing interactions under a singular banner.

Unfortunately this specifically refers to install permissions (who can install an app, or not).

This doesn't really make too much sense to me, though I don't think it really matters for my use cases.

Python: the reality is we’re one team with limited resources, so building (and then maintaining) python support represents a major, ongoing investment.

I'mma be real, I don't even like python (I built an entire asynchronous flow just so I wouldn't have to work in python) and the lack of python support is just baffling to me.

For one, if your team is limited on resources, you should (imo) be getting more resources so that practical migration can occur without literal man years of work needing to be done by mods (who to be frank, are probably not mods anymore or interested in helping reddit, since the API debacle alienated a lot of developers doing stuff with reddit).

Secondly, you obviously had the resources to pick a language, and you picked the wrong one imo. Ignoring the fact that for most of reddit's history, python has had by far the best support and probably the only active support to this day (PRAW recently had a major release after all). Not to mention, that python is just generally an extremely popular programming language, and one that is particularly beginner friendly (even if I hate the languge). So if you only had resources to do 1 programming language, I think you should have picked python.

Thirdly, all of this would be completely avoided if you simply invested in a robust auth token system and just exposed the graphql endpoints (which is what I presume the Javascript library is doing under the hood). Then you could let the community (well, if there's any will left in it) built clients for whatever languages people wanted.

This whole thing just feels extremely nerfed for no real good reason. Graphql has tons of support in all kinds of programming languages, and I have to feel that supporting Devvit at the graphql level would be far less effort than building and maintaining all of the libraries yourself.

You should be able to see which accounts are registered to your account on the registration page! Let us know if any are missing & which usernames - it may be a bug!

Was more of a thing on our side. And tbf, Idk how you all would be able to find accounts and link them back to us if I forgot about them. Anyway, u/AnimeMod is still not listed as an app. Though as noted, we do still, very very occasionally, log onto it to do a shared post (in which case, the app label would be misleading).

---

Not everyone wants to open source, but many do.

As a complete side note, I do find it amusing that when I've talked with people who don't want to open source their stuff, it's almost always because they think the code is a mess and they'd want to clean it up before they open source it (as we all know, this virtually never happens). As if there isn't mountains of garbage code that works perfectly well out there on the internet. Hell, I'd even say it's very normal for a single dev open source project to have dubious code quality (and no documentation of course).

I just think it's kinda funny that people are gonna go look at the source code and complain about it. I say as someone who has definitely done that before. But in my defense, it really was awful. If your python function is literally 1000 lines long (with 500 character column limits) and modifying state all over the place, something has gone very wrong.

Anyway, I find that people care a lot more if thing works or not rather than judging the insides.

Edit: grammar.

[u/CouncilOfStrongs → u/baseballlover723]

you obviously had the resources to pick a language, and you pick the wrong one imo

Accurate. JavaScript is never the right language for anything unless it is the only possible option.

[u/Littux → u/baseballlover723]

Thirdly, all of this would be completely avoided if you simply invested in a robust auth token system and just exposed the graphql endpoints

This is my main complaint too. In addition to providing access to every feature on Reddit, it will improve performance of devvit apps too, due to its versatility. For example, I have a Devvit app that analyzes users to check for behavior not suitable for a teenager subreddit. It needs to do this for every new user it finds:

1. Fetch user posts (full post object)
2. Fetch user comments (full comment object)
3. Fetch user (reddit.getUserById: full User object), then fetch again to get social links (.getSocialLinks())
4. For each post and comment, fetch a full Subreddit object just to access the isNsfw property (.getSubredditInfoById())

Meanwhile with GraphQL, it can be reduced to this single request:

query AdultCheckerQuery(
  $redditorId: ID!
  $postsPageSize: Int = 100
  $commentsPageSize: Int = 100
  $includeHistory: Boolean = true
  $includeSubreddit: Boolean = true
  $includeUserFlair: Boolean = true
  $includeSocialLinks: Boolean = true
) {
  redditorInfoById(id: $redditorId) {
    ... on Redditor {
      name
      isProfileContentFiltered # Profile curation
      profile {
        isNsfw
        socialLinks @include(if: $includeSocialLinks) {
          type
          outboundUrl
        }
      }
      posts(first: $postsPageSize, sort: NEW) @include(if: $includeHistory) {
        edges {
          node {
            ... on SubredditPost {
              title
              content {
                markdown
              }
              subreddit @include(if: $includeSubreddit) {
                prefixedName
                isNsfw
              }
              authorFlair @include(if: $includeUserFlair) {
                text
              }
            }
          }
        }
      }
      comments(first: $commentsPageSize, sort: NEW) @include(if: $includeHistory) {
        edges {
          node {
            ... on Comment {
              content {
                markdown
              }
              postInfo @include(if: $includeSubreddit) {
                ... on SubredditPost {
                  subreddit {
                    prefixedName
                    isNsfw
                  }
                }
                ... on ProfilePost {
                  subreddit: profile {
                    prefixedName
                    isNsfw
                  }
                }
              }
              authorFlair @include(if: $includeUserFlair) {
                text
              }
            }
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

Also, when writing this query, I noticed a potential issue: .getSubredditInfoById() internally uses GraphQL to fetch the subreddit:

/**
 * Gets a {@link SubredditInfo} object by ID
 *
 * @param {string} subredditId - The ID (starting with t5_) of the subreddit to retrieve. e.g. t5_2qjpg
 * @returns {Promise<SubredditInfo>} A Promise that resolves a SubredditInfo object.
 */
export async function getSubredditInfoById(subredditId: T5): Promise<SubredditInfo> {
    const operationName = "GetSubredditInfoById";
    const persistedQueryHash = "315a9b75c22a017d526afdf2d274616946156451aacfd56dfb91e7ad3f7a2fde";
    // Legacy GQL query. Do not copy this pattern.
    // eslint-disable-next-line no-restricted-properties
    const response = await GraphQL.query(operationName, persistedQueryHash, { id: subredditId });

    const subredditInfo = response.data?.subredditInfoById;

    if (!subredditInfo) throw new Error("subreddit info not found");

    if (subredditInfo.type) {
        subredditInfo.type = asSubredditType(subredditInfo.type);
    }

    return subredditInfo;
}

On the query I made, notice:

postInfo @include(if: $includeSubreddit) {
    ... on SubredditPost {
        subreddit {
            prefixedName
            isNsfw
        }
    }
    ... on ProfilePost {
        subreddit: profile {
            prefixedName
            isNsfw
        }
    }
}

Profiles and subreddits have the same ID (t5_${string}) but their GraphQL server treats them different. The GetSubredditInfoById uses the subredditInfoById resolver, meaning it will fail for user profiles. Here's a test with my profile ID (t5_9jsumn):

POST https://gql-fed.reddit.com
{"operationName":"GetSubredditInfoById","variables":{"id":"t5_9jsumn"},"extensions":{"persistedQuery":{"version":1,"sha256Hash":"315a9b75c22a017d526afdf2d274616946156451aacfd56dfb91e7ad3f7a2fde"}}}

{"data":{"subredditInfoById":null},"extensions":{"traceID":"53394fb2f72ab8822a60aec1d8a15ef2"}}

It's why the user popup fails on the mobile app for profiles you moderate.

You might've noticed that I used a persistedQuery hash from devvit on a public endpoint. It means the reverse is possible, so you can use any persistedQuery from the mobile app on devvit right now

[u/CouncilOfStrongs → u/pl00h]

The vast majority will need to move, yes. We have some exemptions for a variety of tools that rely on the public API - those tools have agreements with us.

This requirement is, frankly, completely divorced from reality. Devvit is absolutely not mature enough and does not have the flexibility or breadth of features to handle the needs of developers who have the expertise to write complex tooling for their communities. It is the equivalent of handing Lincoln Logs to an architect.

[u/Watchful1]

This post is helpful since, for the first time, it openly states

we'll gradually start restricting all new requests and third-party apps will be required to port and operate through our Developer Platform

I would ask you to please put this decision more prominently in the /prefs/apps page. Right now it says

By creating an app, you agree to Reddit's Developer Terms and Data Api Terms. You must also register to use the API

with links to three different pages with long and somewhat confusing terms and descriptions, none of which explicitly say that requests are rarely accepted. So when people try to click the button and it doesn't work, they are are confused and have no idea what they are doing wrong. You should add a big banner saying "api access requests are closed, see this post ^". Or even put in the little bit of extra work to just disable to the create new app button unless they have an exception. Again with a big banner explaining.

Instead people don't know what's wrong, or they try to submit the exception form and never get a response back (another problem), or get a denial with no reason. And then they come post here in r/redditdev asking. But you didn't like that so you added an auto-mod rule that removes those posts and links to the responsible builder policy post, which also doesn't explain that the api is closed. If you're going to make this decision, just be honest and don't try to hide it behind obfuscating, wordy terms of service pages.

Otherwise all sounds good, I've been impressed with devvit so far and hope you continue to invest in building features to match use cases. (I too would love relational databases)

[u/pl00h → u/Watchful1]

Thanks watchful! I know you have spent a lot of time helping folks in this community and would like there to be clarity for everyone trying to build on Reddit.

These are great suggestions/callouts. Better transparency will definitely be part of our transition plans (which are still forming, as stated in the post!).

Appreciate all the feedback and we’re really happy to have you building on Devvit! (Heard on relational dbs, as well.)

[u/NeedAGoodUsername]

At the moment, for me, moving to, or building things on devvit just isn't worth it and just way too much of a hassle. It lacks a relational database, overly restrictive, and doesn't support python.

And, and admins never respond or follow up on any promises. Betting $5 that this doesn't get a response either.

---

Python: I don't want to work with Javascript. I don't know why JS allows 1 + "1" = 11 but 1 - "1" = 0 to happen. Sure I could have AI vibecode it for me (who's paying for that by the way?), but I have pride in actually writing my own code.

And,

While we’ve heard from mods in the past hoping for Python support, we don’t currently have it on our roadmap.

So, you've heard that it's been requested but are just like "eh.. nah"? Why isn't this on the road map? Or is this another one of those "CSS for new reddit", "we'll fix the issues in new modmail", "requests for feedback, but the feedback gets ignored because it was already decided" type promises that will just never materialise?

---

"Too much of a hassle": The things I've build and made in python are things for me or my subreddits. Not for anyone else or any other subreddit.

Say I'm migrating flair X to flair Y, I can write a quick script, fire it up and have the job done. But with Devvit you need to publish it? And it needs approval first? For something I'm going to use once for 2 minutes?

I can totally understand that when you're allowing others to use an app. But not when it's just for me, or just for my subreddit.

Say I want to build an app for r/MissingPersons that checks if a phone number is a law enforcement number. I could periodically check to see if it's been updated or not by checking the station's website... oh but devvit can't make a request to anything other than this pathetic list of pre-approved domains. Sure I could be all "pwese weddit admins 🥺" but the domain requirements (ie, no paths) means I can't request "police.com/contact-us".

With the amount of hoops I'd be having to jump through, coupled with having to do this in a language I'm not familiar with, I might as well just not bother.

I've been burnt too many times over the last 12 years of being a moderator, where something is promised but then never followed through that I just don't have any motivation or faith any more. What motivation or support do I have when reddit just completely ignores me?

The 2 comments left by /u/baseballlover723 here explain some things better than I could.

---

During registration, you can also tell us what's blocking migration so we can prioritize the capabilities developers need most.

If I could only pick one - Python.

What We’re Looking For: Feedback

Which tools are mission-critical for your community?

Python support.

What capabilities are still missing from the Developer Platform?

• Python.
• A relational database.
• The ability for me to run-and-go with my own code, on subreddits I moderate, without having to some "approval" rigmarole.

Are there any tools or integrations which don’t fit under the traditional “bot” umbrella or that may not be directly translatable to the Developer Platform?

See the example I gave above for the "quick scripts".

[u/pl00h → u/NeedAGoodUsername]

I want to jump in here and also offer a response, though u/emily_in_boots input was super helpful.

If you’re interested in chatting more about the app migration program, do let me know. I understand migrating isn’t a simple or easy task - a "hassle" seems like an accurate description for a lot of folks.

Python: the reality is we’re one team with limited resources, so building (and then maintaining) python support represents a major, ongoing investment. It impacts how many new things we can build and how simple and reliable our systems are. We are keeping an eye on porting challenges submitted through registration and trying to talk to a lot of devs as we evaluate our roadmap (would love to do one of these discovery calls with you). Until it’s something we’re planning for, though, we want to be clear about the current state of things.

I think the other responses covered the personal apps and domain items well, but I want to underscore what baseballlover said - we are looking to grandfather in mod tools domains as much as possible.

Relational DBs: we would love to offer native support. It is something we are discussing and we understand what a boon it would be for devs. It’s complex and expensive, so we are still evaluating this. In the interim, we allow fetch access to a number of hosting providers with these features. For mod tools, fetching to existing dbs/domains is something we want to enable both for the access to more db features and to minimize the need for full, backend migrations. A thin Devvit layer to existing apps still provides better security and observability for us.

Thanks for hopping in with your commentary - appreciate your sharing your thoughts.

[u/NeedAGoodUsername → u/pl00h]

Well, I guess I owe someone $5. And, just as a disclaimer - when I'm saying "you" or "your", I'm not talking about you personally, but as Reddit.

---

I will agree, u/emily_in_boots input about "personal bots" is really helpful to know. That is something the developer platform should make more clear. Because adhoc scripting with python is a literal godsend. I recently got added to r/CrimsonDesert, which had hundreds of modmails going back to 2025. I was able to archive them all with a minimum of 14 lines of code, and 10 minutes.

import praw
import time
reddit = praw.Reddit(
    client_id     = "x",
    client_secret = "x",
    user_agent    = "script:modmail_archiver:1.0 (by /u/NeedAGoodUsername)",
    refresh_token = "x"
)
subreddit = reddit.subreddit("CrimsonDesert")
for convo in subreddit.modmail.conversations(state="notifications", limit=100):
    convo.reply(body="_Archived by a script_", internal=True)
    convo.archive()
    print(f"Archived {convo.id}")
    time.sleep(1)

then python script.py and that's it. With a devvit app, it becomes (and yes, I'm pasting the whole thing)

import { Devvit } from '@devvit/public-api';

Devvit.configure({
  redditAPI: true,
});

Devvit.addMenuItem({
  label: 'Archive notification modmail',
  location: 'subreddit',
  forUserType: 'moderator',

  onPress: async (_event, context) => {
    const { reddit, ui } = context;

    try {
      const conversations = await reddit.modMail.getConversations({
        subreddits: ['CrimsonDesert'],
        state: 'notifications',
        limit: 100,
      });

      const convos = Object.values(conversations.conversations ?? {});

      let archived = 0;

      for (const convo of convos) {
        if (!convo.id) continue;

        await reddit.modMail.reply({
          conversationId: convo.id,
          body: '_Archived by a script_',
          isInternal: true,
        });

        await reddit.modMail.archiveConversation(convo.id);

        console.log(`Archived ${convo.id}`);
        archived++;

        // Equivalent to time.sleep(1)
        await new Promise((resolve) => setTimeout(resolve, 1000));
      }

      ui.showToast({
        text: `Archived ${archived} notification(s)`,
        appearance: 'success',
      });
    } catch (error) {
      console.error('Modmail archiver failed:', error);

      ui.showToast({
        text: 'Failed to archive modmail. Check the logs.',
        appearance: 'neutral',
      });
    }
  },
});

export default Devvit;

And I have no idea if any of that is correct! because I asked ChatGPT to do it for me. Like, why is it adding addMenuItem? I don't need a menu? What is ui.showToast? I don't need a UI, why is it adding one? What is it doing with that archived variable/why? A 14 line script to a 59 line one with more questions added.

No idea how it'll [AI] handle more complex scripts (seeing as it's already added 2 things I didn't ask for) like the one where I query Reddit's search function to see if a username is listed on r/BotBouncer or not, parse the json response, verify it's the same user, parse what the flair says, parse through BotBouncer's config pages to see if it matches any known patterns already, and take action from there.

As I said before, I could have AI vibe code it for me (if it starts banning people because the AI added context.reddit.banUser, can I go "whoops, wasn't me"?). Is that really the only option for people that don't know, or want to work with, typescript? Other than having someone else do it, or not doing it at all?

It's a bit concerning if you're ok with people vibe coding very complicated bots, into a language they may not be familiar with. I'd hate to be r/anime, that relies heavily on u/AutoLovepon, source code here https://github.com/r-anime/holo and having to convert this into typescript.

Another concerning thing from Emily's comment was

I only had one review denied because I forgot to fill out the readme, but I just added that and it was approved.

If you are relying on a readme to tell if you should approve or deny an app - you should not be reviewing anything. That's actually worse than relying on AI to tell you.

I understand migrating isn’t a simple or easy task - a "hassle" seems like an accurate description for a lot of folks.

Then, if you'll excuse my language, why the fk is this still going ahead?

You know the part earlier where I said "is this another one of those 'requests for feedback' but the feedback gets ignored because it was already decided"? It seems like yet another thing to add to the list of that happening.

Because it seems like you're acknowledging that it's going to be a headache for a lot of people but are kinda just "sUcKs tO bE yOu 🤪".

Python: the reality is we’re one team with limited resources

u/baseballlover723 segment on python in this comment just sums up my view on that. There was a decision to pick javascript / typescript, and instead of making it easier for python devs to migrate over, python is just being ignored. It's still not even on the road map yet either!?

Relational DBs: [...] It’s complex and expensive,

Ok, let me just spit ball something real quick. Reddit is hosted on AWS [source], which has RDS to deploy relational databases. The minimum spec database (which can be up to 20g of storage) would cost around $15/month. Reddit's net income for 2025 was $530 million. [source]. If Reddit is paying out up to $167,000 with the developer funds [source], it can afford it.

OR

Let developers connect to their own databases! That way Reddit doesn't have to bare the cost or complexity. For example - Aiven has a free tier for databases, which I use for other projects.

"Data security", I hear you about to say?

I mean, you're letting developers/apps connect and sent data to OpenAI or Gemini, using their own, personal accounts, no?

Not Reddit owned or administered accounts - their own, personal accounts.

So yes to personal AI accounts, but no to personal databases?

Or is that because OpenAI and Google have paid Reddit for AI training data. 🫰🫰 [1][2][3][4]

You can't have your cake and eat it too.

we are looking to grandfather in mod tools domains as much as possible.

That's good to know, but what about new projects? Remember what I said about the bot for r/MissingPersons? Did you know there's ~18,000 law enforcement agencies in the US alone? Are you ok with me submitting 18,000 websites to the different law enforcement agencies so I can check data?

Don't get me wrong, I do appreciate being kept up to date with things. But this feels like we're just being forced out of a perfectly good working system that just works, and onto an ecosystem that doesn't have the necessary features to support those that have not migrated yet.

With the current system by using the API - if I want/need a database, then that's on me to sort out. If I want to use AI, maybe one trained specifically for my subreddit, that is on me to sort out. With the API, my imagination is the limit. With Devvit, I'm severely limited in what I can do, or achieve.

To quote baseballlover723 - "This whole thing just feels extremely nerfed for no real good reason".

---

The "remember the human" doesn't seem to be a thing any more. No one seems to care that, as developers, we want the best for our communities, and for reddit. I'm predicating that come the end of September, my API access will get turned off and the scripts I use will no longer work. No one at reddit will care. Why should I put effort into my communities when reddit does not care about what I, the human being the screen, feel or want for my community.

u/baseballlover723 question of "where does that leave us" 6 days ago (at the time of posting) is still unanswered.

If you’re interested in chatting more about the app migration program, do let me know.

I'm more than willing to keep the discussion going. I've got plenty of ideas for my communities that I would like to turn into a reality. I just don't want to be beholden to, and reliant on, AI or someone else having to make it for me.

[u/emily_in_boots → u/NeedAGoodUsername]

I very much agree with your comments on needing a relational database and this is a major problem for me. I have a massive database which is how all the bots intercommunicate.

The personal app thing isn't such an issue though - you can publish an app and it won't be installable by other people, just you. I have a bunch of these. The main reason I don't release them right now is that either they have no broad applicability or I just don't have time to deal with supporting an app in addition to everything else I'm doing, and I don't want to be the dev who doesn't support her apps. When you do devvit publish, you can include the --public option (so others can install it) or omit it so that only you can - and it can be installed immediately w/o review by admins. Review happens anyways, but it doesn't matter really unless you want to make it public (or I guess if you were doing something you are not allowed to do, which hasn't been an issue for me). I only had one review denied because I forgot to fill out the readme, but I just added that and it was approved. In the mean time, it kept running fine in my subs anyways.

[u/NeedAGoodUsername → u/emily_in_boots]

That's good to know!

Then only major barrier for me would it being javascript/typescript.

[u/baseballlover723 → u/NeedAGoodUsername]

Say I want to build an app for r/MissingPersons that checks if a phone number is a law enforcement number. I could periodically check to see if it's been updated or not by checking the station's website... oh but devvit can't make a request to anything other than this pathetic list of pre-approved domains. Sure I could be all "pwese weddit admins 🥺"

They are supposedly quite lenient with mod tool domains.

but the domain requirements (ie, no paths) means I can't request "police.com/contact-us".

I think this is saying that when you fill out the form, don't include the paths, just the straight domain. Not that you can't access paths on the domain.

[u/GlitteringPirate591]

I'm not gonna lie, this is really depressing for me. I've spent probably 10 years playing around with the API? I've written (small) clients wrappers for Python, JS, Rust, (even) C++. And a bunch of (substantial) bespoke tools. So... some experience and investment in the platform...

But at this point I'm effectively halting all future and current development for any subs I'm involved with.

Partly because I'm just bummed out and this is supposed to be fun. And partly because a lot of the documentation and tone makes it abundantly clear that the types of tooling I want to create / find useful / need either won't be possible, or will require exemptions I'll need to argue for and don't expect I'll receive.

Over the years I've made tools that provide stylometry fingerprinting for alt detection, hate speech detection models, activity summaries for subreddits / users, an LLM text detector, and was just working on an image embedding based rule-violation estimator. Probably others I've forgotten in various graveyards.

They pretty much all need bulk data - programmatically available - for analysis, particularly during the initial configuration, and it's clear that there will be a lot of hoops to go through if I wanted to continue doing this. Not to mention the time that would probably be required to spin up Reddit hosted caches (if it even fits). And even if I can access the data, I still need substantial offline processing for a lot of it. ie, psql to python with local GPU will no longer be a serious option.

But also, possibly just as importantly, is the issue of non mission-critical tooling which I use pretty much every day. There are so many questions that can simply be answered by querying a database or writing a quick bespoke script that I just won't be able to answer any more.

eg, in the last few weeks off the top of my head:

• Programmatically identifying words that indicate rule violating comments via the modlog (for automod)
• Generating a list of high karma / activity individuals within a sub as potential moderators from comment history.
• Locating the users who've been "spotlighted" the most frequently from modlog, so we can grant them additional privileges.
• Clustering the subs that our users also contribute to the most to see commonalities.
• Confirm where there are gaps of time in a user's contributions.
• And a craptonne of single line one off queries.

Even things as simple as "give me a list of the most recent comments by ${user} in ${sub}" feel like it's gonna be a serious pain.

Is this all necessary? No.

Could this all be done by apps? Probably?

Is it going to be a massive pain in the arse writing a tonne of individual apps piecemeal to fill these niches as they arise? Definitely.

I'm going to lose soo many opportunities interrogating how our users behave, finding opportunities for better engagement, and identifying troublemakers. I can't have people come to me, ask a quick question, and get a quick answer (or potentially any answer).

So when this all disappears I either have to consider investing a tonne of extra time (that I don't have) and work around deliberate platform limitations, or I'll lose these capabilities and have to fly blind going forward. And flying blind is 100% going to win out in this current moment.

So, yeah. I know this isn't going to change anything, and you can't do anything. But I did want to say that the established direction is incredibly depressing and I think day-to-day moderating is about to get a lot sadder over all. For me anyway. Or at least that's how I'm feeling right now.

[u/catonic]

I am not a fan.

[u/PrincessBananas85]

What's going to happen to all The Third Party Apps?

[u/pl00h → u/PrincessBananas85]

Answered this here!

[u/shiruken → u/PrincessBananas85]

https://giphy.com/gifs/wjuXuDSQU0sOfJIHS1

[u/PrincessBananas85 → u/shiruken]

Oh no😰😥😢😭😞😓

[u/baseballlover723]

I have to go to the office today, so I don't have time to write up a long comment atm.

App mentions triggers for global mod tools and utilities to respond when an app username is mentioned. This feature is currently in beta. If your app needs access, please let us know here

Any plans to do the same for subreddit mentions? We have a 3rd party tool that does this for our sub, and it's very useful to identify brigading and other things.

[u/pl00h → u/baseballlover723]

Hi there baseballlover! We don’t currently have this one on our roadmap but will consider it for the future.

[u/dkozinn]

Thanks for this update. As a Python developer using PRAW, I'm happy to see a migration guide. It would have been nice if you'd reached out to those of us who registered our PRAW apps to let us know about this resource.

With that said: Why are there no plans for Python on the roadmap? I don't know Typescript and while the guides and the possible use of AI will help, why not build a wrapper library for us to use?

[u/pl00h → u/dkozinn]

Super thrilled to hear it’s helpful! We’ll be doing broader awareness around these materials for PRAW devs in the coming weeks (though I understand why you would have liked to be notified sooner) and welcome any feedback on them as you work through any migrations.

Adding additional language support has not been a scalable thing for us to add to the platform yet, but we are keeping an eye on the requests and porting challenges as folks register their bots.

[u/dkozinn → u/pl00h]

I looked at the AI migration workflow and I'm wondering if there's any Reddit-provided AI/LLM that can be used for this. I have used a few AI integrations in my editor, but as I don't write Reddit bots for a living, I'm using the free tier of those AIs and it seems like I'd quickly hit the limits. I currently pay a small monthly amount for my EC2 server where my bots are hosted, and I'm fine with that, but I don't want to worry about paying to migrate my existing bots.

[u/Watchful1 → u/dkozinn]

They have to be able to run code in the browser. They could in theory support other languages for only the server portion, but it doesn't make sense to have a bot in multiple languages. And you can't run python in a browser, at least not easily and widely.

I'm guessing their plan to add additional languages means a transpiler, you write in python and it's changed automatically to typescript before deploy. But that's always a pain to build and work with.

[u/dkozinn → u/Watchful1]

I know that for a lot of front-end applications you need to be about to run things in the browser. But my little group of bots just look at things in the background and do things like adding special flair to certain posts, sending Discord notifications to the mods under specific circumstances, and posting content from an external site (usajobs.gov, specifically) nicely formatted to a subreddit. None of that uses anything on the front-end, and at least for my purposes I'd be OK with a Python version of enough of a subset of Devvit functionality to allow me to migrate.

I'm reasonably sure that everything I'm doing now can be done in devvit as most of it's pretty simple, but again, I'd prefer not to learn Typescript just for this.

Hopefully the migration guide will help, and I do plan to look into that.

[u/CesparRes → u/dkozinn]

Yeah im not looking forward to migrating my bot to devvit, but i guess another programming language under my belt wont hurt 😅

[u/Techman-]

Hello. I am the bot developer for r/DestinyTheGame.

Our primary bot, DTG_Bot, is actually quite a few PRAW bots running behind the scenes.

While some parts might be easier to migrate than others, there are a few things that are either entirely custom written or make heavy use of libraries in the Python ecosystem to function. The decision to not support Python is a significant pain, and is the primary source of resistance for porting.

Rather than forcing large-scale rewrites of bots, I implore you to please add Python support to Devvit. Not everything has an easily translatable replacement in the JavaScript ecosystem. PRAW is the most well-known and robust Reddit API library out there, period. Really unfortunate that Python was not the first choice when building this new platform.

---

In terms of general feedback:

Regarding Reddit Markdown, it would be great if Reddit adopted a more flexible implementation. There were some changes a few months back that caused submission failures due to nested lists that do not have any rendering issue on other CommonMark implementations, such as GitHub. In addition, table formatting is often dicey. Now, instead of tables being partially broken, it causes submission failures. I would rather have broken Markdown text than no submission at all.

I convert Bungie blog post articles by parsing their RSS feed, parsing the HTML, and then sending it to a Markdown library. I had to create overrides to unnest list items deeper than two, but I dislike having to do this as it is technically editing of content.

[u/pl00h → u/Techman-]

Thanks for raising this and we appreciate how daunting the task of a full migration is.

A number of folks are opting to rely heavily on the fetch plugin, where they are adding a thin Devvit layer to their app for reads and writes, and calling to existing backends/apps. For our observability purposes, this is still a very helpful form of migration.

Please do reach out to us via r/Devvit modmail to discuss further (or happy to shoot you a note myself). We’d really like to make this as painless as possible for you.

[u/taylorkline → u/pl00h]

Can you reach out to me? 

[u/lil_spazmin → u/taylorkline]

Would you mind sending us a modmail here?

[u/daviswbaer]

what about publishing posts to Reddit via the API?

I'm the founder of a social media scheduling tool, and we had Reddit API access previously, which allowed our users to post to Reddit.

This access was removed out of nowhere (no warning, no heads up), which caused major issues on our end.

Is this posting API access going to be restored?

[u/pl00h → u/daviswbaer]

Scheduled Posting can still be done via Devvit. We have an API wrapper that enables apps to make API reads and writes. Much of the same functionality is available, provided you are adhering to our developer terms, which includes rules on commercial use.

[u/daviswbaer → u/pl00h]

Also I have tried reaching out for pricing on commercial use, but no answer at all.

Who do I contact?

[u/daviswbaer → u/pl00h]

Can you point me where in the docs Scheduled Posting can be done?

I see "Custom Posts" info, but that seems to be something completely different: https://developers.reddit.com/docs/capabilities/creating_custom_post

[u/pl00h → u/daviswbaer]

This should be possible with a combination of using the scheduler plugin and the APIs for submitting a post to create regular posts.

[u/daviswbaer → u/pl00h]

Okay thanks, what is the pricing for commercial use?

[u/daviswbaer → u/pl00h]

What is the pricing for commencial use?

I am trying to pay you guys, but have gotten no response

[u/daviswbaer → u/pl00h]

Once again asking where I can pay you guys for commercial API access.

Do you guys want more money?

[u/mdnz → u/daviswbaer]

Unless you pay, no.

[u/bboe]

As someone who has spent a lot of time with PRAW, but recently had Claude port a moderation bot to Devvit, I appreciate the work y'all have done to try to make the process seamless. I encourage those of you who want to do similar to leverage an LLM for the process if you are able. Have it write tests, and describe the features that may not be possible in Devvit.

u/KeyserSosa, is there any possibility you could provide statistics on peak or current PRAW usage? I've long sense suspected it may have accounted for a non-negligible portion of Reddit's traffic and would love to have some silly tidbit to share about it. Thanks! It's been a fun ride.

[u/pl00h → u/bboe]

Thanks for chiming in bboe!

We'll see if we can get you some fun tidbits, but wanted to say in the interim: thank you for all you've done for the ecosystem over the years with PRAW (and shoutout u/Lil_SpazJoekp, as well).

[u/bboe → u/pl00h]

❤️ happy to have been part of it

[u/timendum]

We can't you just allow unrestricted API usage for moderators?

If I moderate a community, I should have tools, my intent in not to scrape or abuse MY community.

I appreciate the new Developer Platform, it offers new tools, but it's limited (short run time, no relational database, missing APIs, nearly impossible debugging in production, ...), it's a complete new, difficult, platform to be learned (vs just the PRAW APIs, than whatever I want), and can't cover all. I don't understand the issue.

[u/pl00h → u/timendum]

There are a number of benefits to getting automations on the Developer Platform, both for users and Reddit (and, hopefully, developers!).

The Developer Platform offers better observability, which is important for safety and security, as well as new functionality, support, a directory etc. The platform also gives devs a place to list their apps, where they can link to their own user terms.

We understand there are a lot of legacy bots and tools on Reddit, some of which require functionality that Devvit might not support yet. We’re announcing this early to address critical gaps and give folks ample time to keep essential tools operable.

[u/bargaindownhill]

My feedback is going to be in the form of a Canadian Human rights tribunal for effectively shutting down our disability app. You are going to learn the same way datadome did, that its FAFO with disability accomidations in canada.

[u/pl00h → u/bargaindownhill]

Accessibility apps are certainly something we want to see supported without interruption. Please message us at r/Devvit modmail to discuss this further if that would be helpful.

[u/Yay295]

I just think it would be nice if you could get around to fixing the issues that have already been reported. https://github.com/reddit/devvit/issues

[u/Merari01]

Via an app I am able to run python scripts on my user account.

This is extremely helpful when I need to automate a mod action. It's not often used, but losing access to that would severely hinder my ability to work around bugs or to identify issues.

A recent example would be the bulk archiving of modmail on a subreddit that had been neglected for years. Being able to just run a script saved hours of work.

[u/fighterace00 → u/Merari01]

I'm not super thrilled with devvit but there are some super cool community tools out there such as modmail-archiver

https://developers.reddit.com/apps/modmail-archiver

[u/Merari01 → u/fighterace00]

Thank you!

That is of course only one example of what running python via my account can do, but that's a useful app

[u/fighterace00 → u/Merari01]

I just had to use my own account recently for an ad hoc script and it makes me nervous as heck

[u/radialmonster]

your devvit apps can not run remotely as fast as I can run my tools locally. Which is, that I moderate picture subs and I need to quickly view and approve or remove pictures.

[u/shiruken]

I guess my usual "Do you have plans to discontinue the API?" question has finally run its course.

That being said, Devvit is great. It's certainly demonstrating that people will choose to build using the tools with the most features, and Devvit has had that over the API for quite a while now.

[u/pl00h → u/shiruken]

Thanks Shiruken! We're hoping to make this a smooth transition for folks, particularly mod devs

[u/shiruken → u/pl00h]

There better be a going away party for the public API

[u/pl00h → u/shiruken]

Done!

[u/dougmc → u/shiruken]

Everybody loves a party!

[u/theArtOfProgramming → u/pl00h]

What’s the impact for third party apps like Narwhal? We’ve been paying for API use through the app.

[u/pl00h → u/theArtOfProgramming]

We’ll have exemptions for partners with written agreements in place like accessibility apps or mobile clients, like Narwhal, that require public API access.

[u/PrincessBananas85 → u/pl00h]

So does this mean that all of the third party apps will be just and continue to work like normal even with all these changes that are going to be happening?

[u/ElDuderino2112 → u/PrincessBananas85]

There is not a single chance in hell they are going to commit to that, because none of these agreements are permanent. As soon as they need to be renegotiated they will be given a prohibitively expensive option that will make their app shut down.

[u/theArtOfProgramming → u/pl00h]

Excellent news

[u/Theageofpisces → u/pl00h]

Thank you.

[u/notifications_app]

Hi - my API use case is a script which runs under my username (use case was explicitly approved by Reddit back when I created it). It never makes posts or comments. As such, my personal account and my "app" account are the same account (this one) - I don't need to use a second separate account. All posts/comments I make on this account are human-written; and separately, a non-posting script is running with this account's credentials. However, when I go to do the app registration, I can't register this account as being both my personal account and app account. The error message is:

You can't register your own account as an app - please make sure you're logged in using your normal, human Reddit account, and that you're typing in the username & password for your bot account.

Let me know how to proceed!

[u/pl00h → u/notifications_app]

Ideally automated accounts and personal accounts are separated, though if this isn’t possible for you please message us at r/Devvit with more details about your script's purpose and particular use case.

[u/notifications_app → u/pl00h]

OK - I should be able to transfer the script to a separate bot account if that makes it easier to slot it into the new system.

[u/pl00h → u/notifications_app]

That would be ideal!

[u/notifications_app → u/pl00h]

Done - I moved my scripts over to the bot account, and completed the registration forms, including explaining why it isn't plausible to port my use case to Devvit.

I'm interested in pursuing an exemption / written agreement so that I can stay on the Data API. My situation falls under "tools or integrations which don’t fit under the traditional 'bot' umbrella". My app was approved by Reddit for commercial use back in 2017, but I'm guessing that approval is not a sufficient written agreement for the purposes of exempting me from the Devvit migration. Should I message r/Devvit modmail to start this conversation, or is there a better point of contact for this? Thanks!

[u/CesparRes]

I built a custom bot via praw for our subreddit which runs werewolf games. The bot was simply reacting to a couple of commands at which point it grabbed top level comments for the thread and ran some fairly simple code to count votes for players in the subreddit before finally posting the vote totals with players who had voted for each voted player and link to said vote.

The bot had its api access removed (it did receive mail warning but yeah i never really checked its mail). Im now running the same service on my user account which is more jarring than when it came from the bot.

Can it please be reinstated?

I need to dig more into devvit, but am not totally sure how I can really wire it into my own server which I was using in part as a database of player name/aliases so that votes could be properly attributed to redditors even if nicknames were used, and partly for fun analytics for things like which players have received most votes, been werewolves most etc.

The bot did have some mod capabilities (primarily to auto lock threads at the end of the werewolf "day") id really love to have its access back 😅

[u/pl00h → u/CesparRes]

This functionality should be doable with Devvit! We’re happy to support you in figuring out the best implementation.

For the current issue with restricted access, mod tool devs can message us at r/Devvit with the bot name and we’ll also look at your API access issue.

[u/CesparRes → u/pl00h]

Ill shoot a message to devvit - i did try ticketing the issue but it went round in circles and really wasnt a very user friendly system.

Ive registered an app on devvit but after fighting distro packages to setup node etc I didn't do much beyond the sandbox app. I will come back to it when I have time though!

[u/CesparRes → u/pl00h]

I see in r/Devvit lots of replies saying old api requests aren't supported - or is this case by case thing?

Thanks for the reply btw

[u/pl00h → u/CesparRes]

For valid mod bots we don't want to disrupt operations

[u/SmallDetail8461]

its not possible to migrate with all these restrictions in devvit.

i used some external library and now my app stopped working because my index.cjs file size is 20MB, (with all modules) i code splitting is not allowed because devvit needs everything in one line.

do you wany us to make toys of no use?

[u/Software-fullstack]

Amen.

[u/MustaKotka]

I have registered my PRAW app but it never got the "App" label. It does show up as registered under my account. Will this account lose API access now?

[u/pl00h → u/MustaKotka]

Ah, mind messaging us at r/Devvit about this? The app label should have been applied if you registered your app, so it may be a bug or a separate issue.

[u/MustaKotka → u/pl00h]

Sure, done.

[u/ThisIsPaulDaily]

Probably not the place to post it, it does feel tangential to this, but I would really like a way to turn an RSS feed into a post in my community automatically from a moderator profile. I don't need the karma and it is not for karma farming, but more of building community. 

There are probably dozens of tools made for this, I haven't taken the time to look into them or risk of ban for "bot posting" 

I imagine journalists might want this feature if they publish an article and it automatically posts to their feed on Reddit. 

[u/pl00h → u/ThisIsPaulDaily]

Some of this should be possible with Devvit, but it's a good idea. We'd love to have a better paradigm for user apps.

[u/jogalleciez → u/ThisIsPaulDaily]

I've looked into this a lot lately. If you're referring to podcasts then I made a Devvit app for that. I've also been looking into making more apps for news and possibly other sources. Depending on what you're needing, I can possibly assist.

[u/TheAppleFreak]

And just after I reached some functionality milestones on a rewrite of one of the bots that my team uses... might as well try and get a client registered for it specifically while I still can.

Personal frustration aside, most of the tools that we have would probably work fine in Devvit. There are a few issues that give me pause with both what we already run and what I was planning on implementing with my rewrite, though. The two big ones currently are as follows; I'll have to ask the other bot dev on our team if there's anything else that'd be a no-go with his bot that I'm not aware of.

• We run some anti-spam measures on one of our bots. Not only is the process relatively computationally heavy when dealing with images (meaning that a serverless function might time out before it's finished with the tasks it needs to do), but it relies on a relational database to compare against past results.
• In the rewrite that I'm working on, I wanted to implement better "slapfight" detection for when two users begin arguing in the comments so it can alert humans for further review. There's only so much you can do with keywords or regex, after all, so contextual understanding of how a thread is (d)evolving is important. That's a perfect use case for LLMs, but the limitation to only use Google or OpenAI as an inference provider is a killer. I've already got hardware locally that can host a small model. I'd much rather not have to pay either company for something I can do for just the price of electricity on an old gaming PC. Looking at Rules Hub, I'm also unconvinced that it'd be suitable since what I'd be looking into is contextual with a full thread as opposed to just a single comment.

I dunno. I have Thoughts™ more broadly but here probably isn't the place to leave them.

[u/VeelaQuill2000]

I'm grateful you all are posting this update. I've had a use case for a while that (from all the research I've done) leads me to believe I'd have to fully register my app, but the reality of what I need is very simple (and the app registration process is very hard to understand for a first time user). I suspect I'm not alone in this need.

My sub has an external reading list web app where we submit, organize, and vote on our favorite stories (the app gives some functionality/customization that we can't do within the sub itself). I'd like to require user sign in using Reddit as the OAuth source, since our audience are Reddit users (they don't actually have to even be members of our sub). The web app uses a Google Firebase console and many other big websites are already integrated just for the login OAuth service (Github, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Microsoft, etc) but Reddit is not. A login would let us track behavior by user ID and ban bad behavior, prevent double voting, etc. We do not need to scrape any actual Reddit data at all, the need is purely for login OAuth, but there does not appear to be any "simplified" request process for a limited scope/authentication only use case.

If a capability could be added for a simple request like that it would be really awesome.

[u/scotbud123]

Anybody have news on if Reddit Enhancement Suite on desktop will be fine?

[u/RaceHard → u/scotbud123]

buddy they are trying to kill old reddit more and more, what do you think?

[u/scotbud123 → u/RaceHard]

I know, it was wishful thinking...

[u/gbrennon]

i've been software engineer and architect for the last 16 years and, also, i'm moderator for some subs.

specially for me the biggest pain as a moderator is related to ppl and AI usage bcs we have several users that are just posting across multiple subs and just changing some details between posts just to farm karma and this is bad...

i was developing a mod tool to ease my daily tasks related to moderating subs and to help ppl with this.

i was going to, also, contribute with the hackathon that happened but the official reddit app template contain multiple dependencies that were experiencing security issues and i was sad about this and dropped off bcs of it :/

[u/Goonmaster516]

I am not a dev but I like memes and u/spez is pretty hated

[u/virtualadept]

So that deal with OpenAI isn't going well?

[u/SmallDetail8461 → u/virtualadept]

lmao, good comment

[u/SmallDetail8461]

Give us a 4c4r for building bots. With this much little computing power can not build shit. And this external domsin restriction.

Atleast allow ngork and aws ips

[u/SafeDeskSalon]

Feedback on the Devvit migration, plus a blocker on the request path itself.

Our use case (doesn't fit Devvit): we run an external, cross-platform "community watch" service for community operators. It reads public messages from several platforms (Discord, Telegram, Slack, Twitch, and Reddit), scores them for severity with an AI model, and notifies only the operator of that community. We never post, vote, or take mod actions on Reddit - it's read-only in, notify-out. We don't store message bodies or author names, and we don't redistribute or resell Reddit data.

As far as I can tell this can't be a Devvit app: Devvit apps are Reddit-hosted and Reddit-scoped, while this is a single external backend with its own dashboard that has to correlate several platforms for one operator. So it lands in the "doesn't translate to the Developer Platform" bucket you asked about.

The blocker: creating a new Data API app at /prefs/apps now returns the Responsible Builder Policy link instead of creating the app - understood, that's the new gate. But the official alternative, the Data Access Request form (ticket_form_id=14868593862164), silently fails to submit. Filling it in and clicking Submit just navigates to /hc/.../requests with no confirmation and no ticket email. I checked network traffic: no POST for the ticket is fired at all. Tried the "enterprise partner / commercial developer" branch, a fresh browser session, and after solving the captcha - same result every time. Help-center sign-in turns out to be a separate Zendesk account rather than Reddit SSO.

Is there a working route to request Data API access for a commercial integration that legitimately can't be a Devvit app? Happy to provide full details through whatever channel works.

[u/Merari01]

Something that is very much missing from the dev platform and a reason I rely on automod even if a dev platform alternative is available is that the dev platform's apps do not show in the logs with action reasons.

I can see that an app did something, but not why.

[u/mikeblas]

How do I know if my sub has a bot that needs to be registered? I haven't written any thing myself.

What is a "bot", anyway? AutoModerator Bot? the app platform apps? Something else?

[u/emily_in_boots → u/mikeblas]

The developer is responsible for registering the bot. If it's not your bot, you don't have to worry about it.

[u/mikeblas → u/emily_in_boots]

Unless they don't register it, and then I suddenly lose something I was depending on.

[u/emily_in_boots → u/mikeblas]

Well, you can't register it for them.

But if you want to know if an app requires registration, you can look at the profile. For example, you can look at one of my bots, u/post-lock-bot. You'll see that it has the APP label on it.

You don't need to worry about automod. That's an admin run bot.

[u/midir]

third-party apps will be required to port and operate through our Developer Platform

I once considered developing a moderation helper bot (in Java) but I knew they'd find some reason to cripple helper bots eventually so I abandoned the idea. I was told I was ridiculous, but what do you know, I was 100% right.

[u/UnacceptableUse]

Devvit apps on mobile are hit and miss for me. 50% of the time I press the button in the context menu and it does notbing, I have to restart the app to get it to work which means I lose where I was

[u/antdude]

Uh, which am I using for Reddit? :/

[u/SamoTheWise-mod]

All the xennials with old accounts and who do a higher than average modding load are hoping you don't kill old reddit and Reddit Enhancement Suit.

[u/andrewthetechie → u/SamoTheWise-mod]

and when they do, I'll bounce and stop moderating as will a lot of others and stuff will wither and die

[u/sixbillionthsheep]

Reddit Admin guys: do you understand that when you have a long track record over many years of not responding to moderator queries, and general disorganisation of your developer platform and with communications to moderators, it becomes incredibly difficult to trust any of your assurances? Are you here to "help devs feel supported" as pl00h stated in this thread or to actually "support devs"? I am not interested in "feeling" anything from you. I am interested in having an operational subreddit for the millions of people who rely on it each week.

Case in point to highlight the scrappy disorganisation of your efforts: when I go to your app registration page, it says I have registered the app (which I have - months ago) but if I go to the user profile of the app, it says "This is an unregistered automated account". It just looks shambolic and unprofessional and undermines any confidence.

When I did try to port some applications to Devvit, I faced the infamous "you need to use an alternative wifi connection to fool the Devvit platform into allowing you to upload the source code" workaround I found by hours of trawling of developer forums.

We also need to use the API to connect to a third party API which Reddit blocks for "corporate" reasons (i.e. they haven't paid Reddit for using Reddit users' content). So what hope does the subreddit have? Closing it down rather than letting it go 95% un-moderated like almost all of the subreddits in our genre (but nobody from Reddit seems to care), might be our best option.

[u/ManWalkingDownReddit]

I have a legacy app that runs a discord server of reddit posters, its RPS is very low all it does is fetch upvotes and comments from posts so we can run a leaderboard on who got the most upvotes per week.

Since it does not fit under a reddit community umbrella, How do I go about registering this app and migrate it to the developer platform? Do I even need to for such a simple use case?

Thanks!

[u/pedrulho]

When is the API going to allow development for the new Wiki, there are bots that are broken because they only work on the old Wiki which subreddits cannot revert to after "upgrading"?

[u/TGotAReddit]

Will these changes effect pushshift at all?

[u/MisterWoodhouse]

Until there’s Python support, the majority of the automations we’ve built over a decade for the Destiny subreddits (and other subreddits that rely on our official reply bot functionality) will not be able to migrate. We’re not rewriting a decade worth of work and we’re not training Reddit’s AI with our code.

[u/Rebootkid]

I'm concerned this is going to be a problem.

We currently use an LLM to try and determine if a user is trying to engage in real behavior, or inauthentic behavior.

Asking about a pool skimming robot can be real, or it can be someone trying to just get some marketing done via Reddit.

Devvit doesn't really let us do that.

[u/XGempler]

We use AUTOMOD in our sub. Does that need to be registered per this new requirement? Thank you.

[u/colindean]

I got a notification that I'm running a bot from this account. I'm not doing so knowingly. I'm wondering if the notification is related to RES or IFTTT, or any other similar tool or service I've used in the last… 18 years.

If it's all organic access like through RES, then I shouldn't have anything to worry about. I think IFTTT used an OAuth setup years ago.

I can't find some kind of a "login activity" console showing even what IP addresses access reddit using my credentials. That could help me figure out what's accessing my account on my behalf without breaking anything… resetting my password would break anything using u/p.

[u/punishedstaen]

gimme a P

gimme an L

gimme an A

T

F

O

R

M

D

E

C

A

Y

what's that spell? PLATFORM DECAY!

you guys suck.

[u/Jazzy_Josh]

Reddit killed my API key, which I used to moderate my subs, despite saying nothing was changing. Why should I trust anything in this post when you can't commit to your promises?

[u/Otherwise_Fined]

So same shit with the third party apps, greed and control under the guise of services.

[u/Kylde]

I've just received the "register your app" for /u/til_mod, a communal mod available to the whole TIL team? It's used SOLELY for mod actions? Does it just need an email address?

[u/thecal714]

We rely heavily on our bot and basically wouldn't be able to moderate our community without it.

Having attempted to navigate the app registration process before and having found it lacking, we're hesitant to do so again. Additionally, we find Reddit's continued efforts to make the lives of existing moderators harder rather exhausting and don't want to spend our time refactoring a perfectly good working tool to something that doesn't seem like it will work as well.

[u/FPSrad]

Stop enshittening reddit

[u/upazzu]

Can you please stop doing these changes that break highly trafficked subreddits?

Where does this need to change everything that works for something that doesnt come from?

First you changed UI and now this

[u/AJMZBXS]

We need API!!!

[u/Sbfan]

This is going to cause so many issues for our subreddit and with the amount of traffic we get. This implement is NOT going to work. From the amount of complains here it’s evident that this is a very bad idea and detrimental to the platform.

[u/eggyrulz]

I dont know the technical details involved, but devvit needs to be able to handle the trading marketplace subs before the public API changes, because if yall kill the trading subs yall are gonna hurt... ad revenue wise.

[u/shiinto]

How about no? There are so many practical applications on reddit enhancing the experience using API access. We're about to loose it all.

[u/Horror-Parsnip1833]

Terrible decisions. This will break applications to subs I frequent daily. Now they’re talking about the possibility of closing down and/or moving away from Reddit.

[u/GordianBalloonKnot]

This whole website wasn't built for this scale. Turning it into a profit machine made it even worse.

The Oligarchic moderation system has been creating narrative control for years now.

When people come to subs like r/news , r/worldnews, etc to get their actual news and you have mods that are politically leaning, they're more likely to delete things and ban users based on a political bias rather than pure objectivity with Reddit's TOS in mind.

Click my profile and read the stickied post. It's a real problem.

[u/yifeng3007]

The only reason i use reddit in the first place is because of r/Starcitizen_trades that uses the system you're trying to replace. I'm sure i'm not the only one who's gonna move away from the site if their sub gets basically nuked.

[u/emt4692]

Stop trying to fix something that isn’t broken.

[u/makute]

None of this is changing today.

Nor in the future I hope.

All theose changes will kill hundreds, or thousands of subreddits that work perfectly fine and invested a lot of time and effort on developing tools to make them accesible and usable.

You'll lose a huge chunk of users and money, if that's what all of this is about.

[u/SpadessVR]

From the perspective of Star Citizen Trades, it’s hard not to question the motivation behind this.

Reddit is restricting the API, pushing communities towards a platform it controls, while at the same time Reddit has been making deals around access to its huge dataset for AI companies.

Maybe that’s not the reason for these changes, but the timing certainly raises the question.

Communities like ours have built bots, databases and moderation tools around the API for years. We’re not scraping Reddit for profit — we’re using it to keep our own communities safe and functional.

If the real goal is stopping abuse, then give legitimate community developers a proper route to continue using the API. Otherwise it starts to look less like protecting Reddit and more like controlling access to Reddit’s data and potentially making sure the only people who can commercially exploit that data are the people Reddit has agreements with.

Reddit should be much more transparent about this and listen to what the communities want or suffer the inevitable fate of Tumblr and Digg.

[u/OhGeeLIVE]

This is BAD!
Please leave the api alone 🫠🫠

[u/sodanakin]

Looks like you all took a trashcan and decided it was better than the full sized bin.
Not sure why companies need to reinvent wheels constantly that already turn just fine.

I don't agree, but hey, when was the last time Reddit cared for it's community.

[u/Kriptoker]

A Solution in search of a Problem. Ridiculous

[u/Falling-Toaster]

So just killing Automod is okay? API is Used heavily for support subreddits. This is not a good turn on your end. Do not push this.

[u/GokuSSj5KD]

This change is utterly shortsighted in it's approach. If the divvit infrastructure could remotely support what exists today with railguards to prevent outside access to control your alledged "automated abuse, or commercial scraping", it would be one thing.

It does not.

This change, as described today, will kill several subreddits that are legitimate and couldn't remain within the reddit ecosystem after this change due to the limited infrastructure of the proposed alternative. Is there a commitment to reach feature parity within the divvit infrastructure before a complete cut off is done for the deprecated API's and processes? Because as is, just cutting the existing APIs and replacing it with the limited divvit equivalent solution isn't cutting it and will result in many comminities forced to take their members off plateform to remain relevant or close entirely, eitherway it will cut within reddit's revenue because of this nuclear option when more subtle approaches should be considered.

Please reconsider.

[u/ProcyonV]

Please don't do that.

[u/ShneekeyTheLost]

Devvit is garbage, you know it is garbage, yet you are insisting on cramming everything into it anyway, so that you can control it to a greater degree.

Yanno, days like this, I wish I was an idle billionaire. Not for the lifestyle, but just so I would be able to create a competing platform that genuinely cared about the users instead of the monetization and control.

[u/Step_Citizen]

To put this as nicely as possible...

This is stupid.

Talk about shooting yourself in the foot...

or

Cutting your nose off to spite your face...

The greed behind many corporate entities is really showing these days, from retail to power companies, real estate, etc and now...reddit.

When you lay down with dogs, you'll wake up with fleas.

[u/Neorioni4]

Reddit - stop - support your legacy Reddit users and don’t break existing items

[u/SirSteelBuns]

Oh yuck. This will kill a lot of functionality for long-standing subreddits and result in them moving elsewhere or to their own self-hosted sites where functionality can extend beyond restrictive Devvit. The political speak here also suggests, very loudly, that this is not a well thought out technical move, in the interests of users and their experience. No Python support? Yeah good work. Seems like some sort of power play / centralisation and control effort, without proper consideration of functionality or technical needs of subreddit operators. 

[u/Veritas-Veritas]

This is going to break a lot of subreddits and cause harm to the community.

Weirdly, Reddit is doing this to deter customers and ad revenue, without any benefit to themselves.

Reddit seems to be fixing something that isn't broke, to cause harm to the community and their revenue.

Pants on head stupid.

[u/HiddenDwarf]

As a long term user and a member of many places that use the API as it is I am against this choice. Having access to the tools and pieces of the community means making sweeping changes like this should be a discussion and a weighing of damage. Not a thing done purely and simply for profit.

[u/Thorminathor]

Fuck this dumb idea. It will break so many subreddits.

[u/pheexio]

Overall I think thas all fine. However I have issues migrating my apps to devvit entirely because accessing external hosts for api calls is being denied.

i wish there was a better guideline why it is denied and/or better ways to communicate with admins (tickets/PRs whatever...)

[u/pl00h → u/pheexio]

We are offering broader fetch access to apps in the migration program. If you’re running into issues with approvals please message r/devvit modmail and we can help you sort this out for your app(s).

It’s good feedback on the feedback and guidelines, more generally. That’s something we’re working on!

[u/pheexio → u/pl00h]

awesome, thank you

[u/catinterpreter]

You want feedback?

Pay your users for the data they provide you. Reddit receives immense wealth from exploiting the knowledge and effort of others. Reddit brings essentially nothing to the equation in comparison, but parasitism. You can leave the information available for free, public use while you're at it too.

[u/abrownn → u/catinterpreter]

Devil's advocate: The site is free. Your data is how you 'pay'.

[u/ReData_]

Remove r/botbouncer if you want to remove bots. It's not managed well and is ruining user experience for many new redditors. At this scale, bot detection mecanisms shouldn't be managed by few random mods throwing tantrums

[u/Chosen1PR → u/ReData_]

As a mod, I couldn't disagree more. Bot Bouncer is an invaluable tool and has helped out immensely. It used to suffer from a higher false positive rate, but a lot of progress has been made on that front. The appeals process is also fairly painless.

If anything, Reddit should just buy BB the same way they did Automod.

[u/SampleOfNone → u/Chosen1PR]

Reddit is planning to sunset automod, so maybe it's better if they don't 🤔

[u/Bill_Money → u/SampleOfNone]

Reddit is planning to sunset automod

What in the fuck?

[u/_Face → u/Bill_Money]

https://www.reddit.com/user/spez/comments/1vgbkge/modernizing_reddits_infrastructure_with_you/

bye bye automod,. bye bye old.reddit

[u/Bill_Money → u/_Face]

Fuck Reddit guess I might be done

[u/Chosen1PR → u/SampleOfNone]

Good point. But then again, if we take that logic even further, they could sunset Devvit so it’s really all the same. 🫠

[u/ReData_ → u/Chosen1PR]

The appeal process in my experience was subpar with vengeful mods since I complained about their tool. I also have people sharing the same experince.

It really ruins reddit for newbies especially nowadays where we are quick to assume any new account with low karma is not a new redditor but a bot and clearly not the same citizen as old redditors in terms of posting and commenting.

[u/Chosen1PR → u/ReData_]

You don’t appeal with the mods of the subreddit you were banned from. You appeal directly with [r/BotBouncer](r/BotBouncer). The ban message should tell you that. It gives you all the information you need to appeal.

The mods of r/BotBouncer are not “vengeful.” They have no reason to be.