It appears API rate limiting has effectively killed these alternatives. You essentially get nothing but “Too many requests” 429 errors.
Lemmy sadly does not have the active niche news and discussions I want. But now nothing can be read without going to Reddit. I hate Spez
There were some discussions among the teddit hosts about attempting to use scraping instead, but it’s not easy and requires a lot of changes to the code. Not to mention it’s going to quickly become a cat and mouse game if reddit makes changes to their site. It’s just not worth it at this point. Reddit doesn’t want us.