i'm pretty sure reddit's api allows a certain amount of requests from an ip address before the user has to actually pay for it. or something along the lines of that.

i think it only halted development, not shut down. i've heard one of the contributors wants to revive the project though. libreddit still works fine if you self-host it and you're the only one using it, but not on public instances. self-hosting is easy tho, just download the latest release binary and run it in a terminal or something.