Teddit

» see teddit.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

A front-end is a website that reads another website on your behalf. Teddit asked Reddit for a thread, stripped out the JavaScript and the banner demanding you install the app, and handed back the text in plain HTML. No account, and nothing phoning home. The subreddit list down the left side was the real Reddit's list, the comments were the real Reddit's comments, and the page weighed about as much as a page weighed in 2004.

It went up in November 2020 and it was never a company. The source lived in a public repository, anyone could run their own copy, and dozens of people did, which is why Teddit existed at a few dozen addresses rather than one. The flagship hosts were teddit.net and the short domain tedd.it, and the developer who ran them was anonymous and paid for them out of their own pocket. That notice puts the scale plainly: thousands of users every month, hosted and maintained and funded by one person.

Nitter was doing the same job for Twitter in the same years, and Invidious for YouTube. The pattern repeats because the problem repeats. A platform gets big enough that reading it requires running its code, and then somebody writes a smaller program that reads it without doing that.

~ the record ~

~ what a front door costs ~

Here is the part that makes Teddit's death different from the apps that died in the same month. The third-party Reddit clients were killed by a bill. Teddit was killed before any bill arrived, by rate limits.

The notice names the symptom: "This is the cause for the '429 Too Many Requests' errors you see lately." Reddit's new restrictions cut the host's access down to a trickle, which the developer describes as rendering the site unusable for more than a handful of users. The pricing, at twelve thousand dollars per fifty million requests, was theoretically available. The notice puts the real bill at hundreds of thousands of dollars for the volume the site was serving, and for a thing funded out of one wallet that is the same as not being available at all.

Claiming Teddit as a memory is harder than it sounds, and that was rather the design. You searched an error message, landed on a four-year-old thread where the one person who ever solved your problem had written it down, and the page opened light and legible. Whether the hostname in the bar said reddit or teddit was not something anyone was reading. A front-end is invisible exactly when it is working, and that makes it very easy to switch off and very hard to mourn correctly.

~ the summer reddit closed the side doors ~

June 2023 is well documented. Reddit announced API pricing that the developers of the major third-party clients said they could not survive, more than eight thousand communities went dark in protest on 12 June, and the apps started switching off at the end of that month. Apollo and Reddit Is Fun both went on 30 June. Steve Huffman's public line was that third-party apps cost the company around ten million dollars a year in infrastructure.

Teddit's notice went up roughly two weeks after that wave, on 14 July, and Hacker News found it on the 16th. It is angrier than the app shutdowns were, and more specific about motive: a deliberate decision by Reddit, written up as an intent to kill content scrapers and third-party apps unless they paid fees the author calls enormous and unrealistic. The last line of the paragraph is the one that lands. Teddit, it says, is just one more victim in a long list of projects killed by the changes.

~ the last commit ~

The GitHub repository was created on 18 November 2020 and the last push to it landed at 05:05 UTC on 31 July 2023, the day before the site went off. The mirror on Codeberg, described in four words as an alternative Reddit front-end focused on privacy, carries four hundred stars and was still being touched in April 2025 by people who had taken the code somewhere else.

Neither repository has been archived. The code is sitting there, correct, maintained in a quiet way, and useless for its original purpose, because the thing it knows how to talk to will not answer it any more. Ask teddit.net for a page in 2026 and the TLS handshake fails before an HTTP request is ever made.

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