"Banned" by reddit
Reddit makes another step in restricting access.
TLDR: reddit appears to block IP ranges for popular hosting services, such as Linode and Oracle Cloud, which prevents running privacy-friendly proxies like libreddit and teddit.
After the July 2023 reddit API pricing fiasco [0] which effectively killed third-party apps, I started hosting an instance of libreddit [1] on my Linode VPS. Libreddit was much faster and less annoying than the official site on mobile, in addition to being better privacy-wise.
A few days ago, when opening libreddit, I was greeted by "Failed to parse page JSON data: expected value at line 1 column 1". My first thought was either some bad data on my end, or some minor change in reddit's formatting that libreddit has to parse.
Checking libreddit's GitHub, I find the same issue [2], where someone suggests reddit has updated their blocklists.
To check this, I log into my libreddit-hosting VPS, and use Lynx to go to reddit.com. I first get a 403 Blocked, and then get redirected to this blurb:
whoa there, pardner!
Your request has been blocked due to a network policy.
Try logging in or creating an account here to get back to browsing.
If you're running a script or application, please register or sign in with your developer credentials here. Additionally make sure your User-Agent is not empty and is something unique and descriptive and try again. if you're supplying an alternate User-Agent string, try changing back to default as that can sometimes result in a block.
You can read Reddit's Terms of Service here.
if you think that we've incorrectly blocked you or you would like to discuss easier ways to get the data you want, please file a ticket here.
when contacting us, please include your ip address which is: ***.***.***.*** and reddit account
Huh, I suppose even though I am probably the only user of this instance, reddit found out about libreddit hosted here and cares enough to block it. Makes me feel important.
However... I log into my other Linode VPS, one that has a different IP address and has never hosted libreddit, and try to open reddit with Lynx from there. Same 403 response and the same text blurb. Seems like reddit might have added several Linode IP ranges to their blocklist.
As a side note, at some point in time, there was m.reddit.com, the official mobile-friendly and fast UI (styled like the late 2000s iPhone), but that was shut down some time this year too.
So, only the slow, shady reddit in the phone browser for me now. Less time spent doomscrolling though, so that's good.