RedMemo — a self-hosted Reddit front-end (Redlib’s UI, Go back end) that archives what it serves, so it keeps working when Reddit doesn’t. Repo (Go + Postgres, AGPL-3.0): https://github.com/Meeks233/Redmemo Live demo (/settings is TOTP-gated, treat as read-only): https://redmemo.meekslab.cc/

Reddit`s funking constraints. Reddit caps each OAuth identity at ~100 API requests per 10 minutes, and IP-bans addresses that push too hard. The one mercy: media (images/video) is served from a CDN and doesn’t count against that quota — only the JSON posts/listing/comment calls do.

Why Redlib runs out. Stateless and unauthenticated — every page view is a fresh upstream hit with nothing kept. Each request pulls only a handful of posts, so the 100-call budget drains in minutes, and there’s no outbound rate limiting to pace it. Worse, it still ships a 2023-era official-app fingerprint; against an unchanged, years-old fingerprint, who else would Reddit block first?

Why RedMemo lasts. I supercharged everything.

  • HR outbound rate-limit — Main gate for your poor API credits, sync with the dynamic ring at the topbar, which could help you easily estimate remaing credits.
  • Control — 100 users rush to your instance, eveyone just clicks one link and your instance is completely disabled for 10mins…? Why couldn`t I just lockdown my instance and leave room for NP ? You can disable upstream service completely at env/settings. (env will persist)
  • 5-layer NP (Natural Prefetch) — L1: main cycle (Pull 100 posts at once) , L2: media, L3: comments, L4 sub icon, L5 audio remux(under construction). I try my best to mimic real human behaviour and disperse those requests, so Redmemo just looks like a real user to Reddit.
  • Archive — Reddit cant hack your homelab or vps to erase your records at Postgresql. What NP gets will come here and ready to serve.
  • Scored cache — You could define cache size (like 1G at env), large and small media are run through a scoring function (LRU+Size) ; eviction is an incremental, low-IO sweep that drops the lowest-value items.
  • Fresh fingerprint — Use the TLS fingerprint from reverse-engineering the official client and auto-derive the User-Agent from Reddit’s official-app release cadence, so it never goes stale. (However Android version is now pinned to 15)

It’s a derivative of Redlib/Libreddit, AGPL-3.0, not affiliated with Reddit.

To be honset, I used a lot of AI — Claude Code (4.6 through 4.8). But core codes were reviewed. The designs (NP, HR, the scored cache) are mine. If you could write better code, we will be very glad to see a new project inheriting from Redlib. Our beloved Redlib just lacks maintenance for almost 3 years, I just try to prolong its life. Anyway I`m just a college student using as much spare time as possible in the last 2 months just try to do something for community…😥

    • ScutterShadow419@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      92·
      13 hours ago

      Five layers of NP (Natural Prefetch), HR (the outbound rate-limit layer) and the caching/failover stack aren’t boilerplate — they’re original designs I built from scratch. The first demo did come together fast, sure, but what you don’t see behind it is two-plus months of testing, reverse-engineering how Reddit actually behaves, hunting down bugs, iterating, and writing a real test suite.

      One concrete example: I wrote the cache-eviction logic myself. Small and large files are each run through a scoring function, and every cleanup pass consults that score to decide what to drop — done as a non-IO-intensive, incremental sweep instead of a blocking purge. That’s not something a one-shot prompt hands you; it came out of actually watching the thing misbehave under load and tuning it until it didn’t.

      If you want to dig in, the commit history and the test suite are right there in the repo — happy to walk through any part of the design.