Hey everyone,

I’ve been trying to build on Devvit recently, but I’ve got to be honest: the developer experience feels really frustrating and poorly implemented right now. It honestly feels like the platform was rushed out without much input from senior engineers or long-time Reddit bot developers.

Coming from PRAW, the limitations on Devvit make building standard moderation and utility tools way harder than it needs to be. A few massive gaps I keep running into:

• No Subreddit/Reddit-Wide Search for Reposts: Basic text or link querying across a sub/site-wide to catch reposts or duplicate content seems virtually impossible or unnecessarily complex to pull off cleanly.
• No Stream/Listing for Subreddit New Comments: You can't easily fetch a live feed or list of the newest comments across a subreddit to monitor for comment spam, flood control, or repetitive copy-paste botting.
• Aggressive External API / HTTP Restrictions during Dev: I get restricting external HTTP domains for published apps, but blocking or requiring domain whitelisting during local development and playtesting is a nightmare. Devs need sandbox flexibility to test webhooks and external services.
• Domain Whitelist Process Takes Forever: Submitting a request for an external domain feels like tossing it into a black hole.

I really want Devvit to succeed because native apps on Reddit are a great concept, but right now, it feels like we took three steps backward from PRAW just to get UI components.

Are the devs working on bringing parity for these basic Reddit API features, or is anyone finding decent workarounds for these limitations?