But in actuality it works just fine? Is the message simply wrong when you plug in your own api key and stay in the free tier of reddit's API?
Correct.
Also, I forked it with some OAuth spoofing and have been maintaining it there: https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib
Like I mentioned, I've been running my own private instance and I've never hit the rate limit so it's been working fine for me.
And I don't know about any API key. AFAIK, Libreddit uses the publicly available JSON, no need for a key (hence why it's read-only). Since it's still working for me, those JSON endpoints must still be available, just highly rate limited now
After doing some analysis (a while ago) on reddit comment/submission rates before and after the boycott and new rate limits, it seems either only a tiny tiny fraction actually left reddit and/or reddit benefited from the negative publicity as much as or more than they lost. Since nothing has changed since then, I suppose there's no point in me staying off the platform anymore, especially if I'm not contributing with OC submissions or comments. Libreddit sounds like a good way to do that, thanks :)
Curious which website do you mean? The official instance is not online anymore. And I'm not aware of an official libreddit website.