I use MacOS because I’m lazier.

Yeah, they'll eventually drive more and more people into sailing the open seas if they keep making these moves.

"Our pricing is $0.24 per 1,000 API calls, which equates to <$1.00 per user monthly for a reasonably operated app," the Reddit worker said.

Uhh... Plenty of services charge less than half of that for the same number of API calls, and they are still able to make money. I would imagine that as large as Reddit is, their cost per 1k calls is way less than $0.10, unless their API is poorly engineered and inefficient AF. This is 100% them just trying to drive third parties out so they can get that sweet sweet ad revenue.

What's funny is there is nothing stopping them from making their own instance. I think the hesitation stems from them coming to grips with reality that few people really want to engage with their messaging when they step out of their bubble.

Honestly, and I say this with no disrespect, but I feel like the UX is pretty lackluster across this entire ecosystem. It's understandable, since I would imagine the bulk of developer priority is going towards just making things work as reliably as possible on the backend side of things. Fortunately, given the open source nature of things, I feel like the community will fill these gaps in over time. :)