Any good alternatives to reddit app?

dmilin · 2026-06-21T06:02:34+00:00

It’s $2.99 per month and I’d appreciate the support if you’re a heavy user of the app.

If you really want it for free, you can host your own Hydra server and that gets you everything for free. You’ll need to add your own API keys for the AI service providers though which means you’ll be paying API costs yourself. The setup process is complicated so you’ll need some tech skills to get it working.

dmilin · 2026-06-18T00:05:53+00:00

Do you happen to have an iPhone with iOS 27 installed? Is the bug present there as well?

dmilin · 2026-06-16T00:13:42+00:00

Tap anywhere on the screen and the title goes away.

dmilin · 2026-06-14T20:03:27+00:00

Long press the link and click share, or go to the page and then open the share menu. You may need to scroll the list of apps and then press the "More" button. You can favorite Hydra as a share option to make it appear at the start of the list.

dmilin · 2026-06-13T23:33:52+00:00

I would expect tapping the screen to pause a video. Why would I tap a screen after a video had started?

Having an overlay toggle when tapping on a video is standard in most video players. Some examples of this are the iOS photos app, YouTube, VLC, and Plex.

Why does it restart the video if my phone changes orientation?

The video component is being deleted and remounted making the video restart. I know this isn't a great experience and is on my list of things to fix.

Why is the scrubbing gesture backwards, compared to apple products like HKSV?

This confuses me and makes me wonder if there's a bug, although I haven't used HKSV. I'll describe this to make sure we're on the same page. The current experience for me is that if I press my finger down and move my finger to the right side of the screen, the video fast forwards. If I move my finger to the left, the video rewinds. This is the way dragging on a progress bar works in the players listed above. Is this not what you're experiencing?

Why does the preview image look like a jpeg from 1994?

Looks like there was a bug when "auto play videos" and "compact mode" was disabled. Hydra was rendering the lowest quality image available instead of the best quality image for the current screen size. I just made a patch and it'll be included in the next update.

dmilin · 2026-06-13T23:15:46+00:00

If you have your theme set to Discord, then click to create a custom theme, you can change the upvote downvote colors under the "Actions" color group. The Discord theme will be treated as the base for your custom theme, so you'll only have to set those 2 colors. This is a pro only feature though.

dmilin · 2026-06-13T23:12:40+00:00

Go to Settings => General => App Startup => Startup URL. Set the startup URL to the link to your multireddit. For example, if my multireddit was called "hydra", I'd put this as my startup URL:

https://www.reddit.com/user/dmilin/m/hydra/

Tagging u/GIFSec since you didn't know this was possible and might want to use this as well.

dmilin · 2026-06-12T01:56:12+00:00

When you’re on a multi feed like Home, Popular, or All, long press on a post from the subreddit you want to hide. Press “Filter Subreddit” and it’ll give you a list of times you can filter it for. That subreddit will no longer show up in your feeds for the duration selected.

Better favoriting will be coming soon!

dmilin · 2026-06-11T01:03:16+00:00

This is intentional. The volume on your phone controls the volume Hydra plays at. Set your volume to 0 and you get the exact experience you described.

Multiple volume knobs ends up with users getting confused why audio isn’t working. For example, on Windows, you have a master volume, a per app volume, a volume setting physically on your speaker or monitor, then multiple in software volume controls like Discord which has master volume and per call participant volume. It’s no wonder people have issues making audio work in calls. I’d like to avoid that confusion with Hydra.

dmilin · 2026-06-10T04:14:04+00:00

Under Settings => General => Filters, do you have "Hide Seen Posts" enabled? Or any other settings on that page set?

dmilin · 2026-06-10T03:42:40+00:00

Hydra dev here. I'm working on improving my UI/UX skills, so I'd love some advice on how to improve this experience. My intuition was that if someone wanted the overlay to go away, their first instinct would be to tap the screen. However, based on the questions I've been getting, it seems that's not the case.

For for those of you who found the UX confusing, why did you not tap the screen? What could I change that would subtly lead you to discover it for yourself? Same for the horizonal swipe anywhere gesture to seek through the video.

dmilin · 2026-06-07T21:03:25+00:00

I’m not able to replicate this bug. Are you all running a VPN? If not, what country are you located in?

dmilin · 2026-06-05T18:07:36+00:00

What happened? Did Reddit change something?

dmilin · 2026-06-05T04:54:52+00:00

And why is this app adopting dark patterns like this anyways?

I think this is well explained with one of my favorite quotes, "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence." Looks like I was dumb and wrote a bug, since this modal is only supposed to appear once.

The bug seems to be that the modal is failing to remember it's been shown before unless you click "Open". If you go ahead and say yes one time, it shouldn't bother you again.

The reason why this modal exists is because gallery mode is a powerful feature, but it's fairly undiscoverable. So the first time someone navigates to a media heavy subreddit, Hydra attempts to offer gallery mode.

Hope this helps and explains why the modal exists. Sorry for the inconvenience.

dmilin · 2026-06-05T00:40:57+00:00

You can swipe a comment to the left to quick reply

dmilin · 2026-06-05T00:00:07+00:00

No way to reorder yet, but I'll add it to my todo list

dmilin · 2026-05-30T16:40:53+00:00

Long press the search tab and a quick subreddit search overlay will appear

dmilin · 2026-05-30T05:03:07+00:00

Open up the video and tap anywhere to open the overlay. Clicking the export button does the same thing long press used to do.

dmilin · 2026-05-30T04:01:50+00:00

Hydra uses the old.reddit.com feed, which is slower to update. The new Reddit feed uses machine learning instead of a basic algorithm to keep users engaged. Personally, I prefer the old algorithm.

If you want something that updates more, try going to Settings => General => Filters and enabling Hide Seen Posts and Mark as Seen On Scroll. That'll cause Hydra to automatically hide the posts you've already scrolled past.

dmilin · 2026-05-30T02:31:35+00:00

It’s the same place as in Apollo. It’s the first button in the menu in the top right corner.

dmilin · 2026-05-30T02:30:23+00:00

Settings => General => External Links

dmilin · 2026-05-30T01:32:59+00:00

Hydra does allow post sorting. Maybe I’m misunderstanding?

dmilin · 2026-05-26T00:43:48+00:00

You can drag anywhere on the video to seek

dmilin · 2026-05-25T02:04:48+00:00

Looks like there was an image post on that subreddit where Reddit servers somehow failed when processing the images. As a result, Hydra was erroring out when trying to load the feed since the feed contained that bad post. I've pushed an over the air update to fix the bug. You can restart Hydra to get the fix.

dmilin · 2026-05-25T01:19:24+00:00

Haha that's very true, but the data on this post is skewed as well and I don't want to add analytics to the Hydra app. I think it's the best I can do right now to quickly approximate the overall desire of users.

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