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Ask HN: What are some of the best Reddit alternatives?

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Re: Ask HN: What are some of the best Reddit alternatives?

#101

Post by agg23 »

1270018080 wrote: post #76
agg23 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it decentralized? While definitely better UX to remain centralized, I think Reddit is clearly showing why that's a problem.

Any problem happening on reddit could also happen on a "decentralized" platform. Whoever is paying for the servers gets to call the shots. All federated options should be automatically eliminated from contention if we're taking it seriously as a reddit replacement.

> Whoever is paying for the servers gets to call the shots

But if everyone can run a server; if I can run my own server just for me to only fetch the stuff I'm following, then I'm not beholden to some unknown or commercial hosting entity.

Re: Ask HN: What are some of the best Reddit alternatives?

#102

Post by ThrowawayTestr »

robotnikman wrote: post #83
ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #41

https://rdrama.net/

This one really made me go wtf. It reminds me of those early web 1.0 websites with tons of random gifs and colors all over the place. Looks harmless at first but the contents are kinda toxic.

We have fun

Re: Ask HN: What are some of the best Reddit alternatives?

#103

Post by pndy »

haolez wrote: post #72
evdubs wrote: post #31

Maybe not the best, and certainly not as popular as some recommended federated services, but Aether (getaether.net) has been interesting to use. It: - is P2P. Everyone using the app sees the same network; no federation keeping communities separate. This also means that everyone receives information from the network, including posts, comments, and moderator actions. One feature here is that if a moderator is overbeari…

Isn't it dead? It's a shame if true.

11d ago: https://meta.getaether.net/t/is-the-project-still-alive/1060

7d ago: https://meta.getaether.net/t/aether-is-being-revived-as-some...

Someone tries to do something around it, I guess

Re: Ask HN: What are some of the best Reddit alternatives?

#104

Post by evdubs »

haolez wrote: post #72
evdubs wrote: post #31

Maybe not the best, and certainly not as popular as some recommended federated services, but Aether (getaether.net) has been interesting to use. It: - is P2P. Everyone using the app sees the same network; no federation keeping communities separate. This also means that everyone receives information from the network, including posts, comments, and moderator actions. One feature here is that if a moderator is overbeari…

Isn't it dead? It's a shame if true.

The development has stalled since 2021, but the app still works. There is a tiny community picking it up in the wake of the Reddit blackouts.

Re: Ask HN: What are some of the best Reddit alternatives?

#105

Post by agg23 »

dsir wrote: post #89
Karsteski wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds very cool, good luck! :) Question though, how will you sustain this platform? I'd be happy to just pay some small fee per month and have some sort of guarantee that my data is not just being sold to the highest bidder. I'd like to be the customer on some social media platform for once

Cheers! One of the key design decisions was to bake in different methods for monetization within each community so that the community admins/mods can get paid. We take a minority cut of each transaction to help fund the platform. Each community has the ability to offer tiered monthly membership plans and can optionally gate individual pieces of content, or the entire community behind the memberships (the content gati…

This seems like a really great idea to help deal with the difficulties in moderation.

Re: Ask HN: What are some of the best Reddit alternatives?

#106

Post by dragontamer »

deepspace wrote: post #80
dragontamer wrote: post #28

Lemmy seems like the front-runner, but wait. Wait wait wait. lemmy.world is perhaps the new instance where people are joining the fastest. But Lemmy.world was just defederated from Beehaw.org. I think this event is key and serves as a necessary discussion point for anyone jumping into the Fediverse. The rules are different. Beehaw.org has some of the most popular groups on all of lemmy right now (including !programmi…

> its really not that complicated either I am used to reading complicated technical specifications, and my eyes were glazing over midway through reading your comment. I do not see how an ecosystem where the groups you can join depends on the instance you join is much better than just having every group hosting a phpBB forum somewhere. The value in reddit was that it provided a 'single pane of glass' for all your inte…

> I do not see how an ecosystem where the groups you can join depends on the instance you join is much better than just having every group hosting a phpBB forum somewhere.

Because those phpBB forums can merge together and form federations. phpBB forum#1 may only have 4-moderators (aka: Beehaw.org) and cannot handle high-traffic major.site.com. But maybe phpBB forum#2 (with very high traffic) can welcome forum#1 as visitors and posters.

> The value in reddit was that it provided a 'single pane of glass' for all your interests.

Yeah but its bullshit. It clearly doesn't work. Not necessarily because of the API-changes, but Reddit has troll-factories, subreddit invasions, and other such messes that require constant administrator support to keep things smooth.

Federation grants new tools to solve these problems. If you've never come across these problems, don't worry, I'm sure you'll see it eventually if you ever become a moderator somewhere.

I recognize that #RedditBlackout is about the API changes. But there's plenty else wrong with Reddit that I'm curious about these new tools being discussed. I'm not doing this because of the Blackout, I'm doing this cause I'm curious.

Re: Ask HN: What are some of the best Reddit alternatives?

#107

Post by xeonmc »

Zetice wrote: post #88
dsir wrote: post #7

It seems like a lot of the suggested alternatives are missing the mark a bit in regards to understanding what Reddit actually is (a community of communities). It seems like a lot of the platforms that are popping up are more akin to being just a huge bucket full of posts with tags opposed to being a collection of communities. They are sort of missing out on capturing the community part. I've been building a platform…

There's a reason people are missing the mark here; the "community" feature is not what gives Reddit its crazy high value for the vast majority of its users. The ceiling is a lot lower for a community engine than it is for a link aggregator. Google News vs. Google+.

I wonder if GitHub repository Discussions can serve the need, since people can star individual repositories, each repository acts as its own subreddit which you subscribe to, and granular access permissions can be given to moderators etc.

You could even make the repo host a GitHub Pages dummy that just loads Giscus/retrieves the list of threads in the repository Discussions and render it with a more Reddit-like UI. Any deficiencies with the interface you can fix yourself or make a pull request to recommend changes.

You could even program moderation bots that runs via GitHub Actions etc, whatever moderation tool were lacking you can just take it into your own hands.

Re: Ask HN: What are some of the best Reddit alternatives?

#108

Post by dragontamer »

tester457 wrote: post #92
dragontamer wrote: post #28

Lemmy seems like the front-runner, but wait. Wait wait wait. lemmy.world is perhaps the new instance where people are joining the fastest. But Lemmy.world was just defederated from Beehaw.org. I think this event is key and serves as a necessary discussion point for anyone jumping into the Fediverse. The rules are different. Beehaw.org has some of the most popular groups on all of lemmy right now (including !programmi…

What moderation tools is Lemmy missing for an invasion of that sort to be so easy?

Hard to say, the developers of Lemmy are clearly swamped and I don't think any new moderation features like this are under development.

But lets say that Beehaw.org had the ability to only invite high-karma users (say, 500 karma) from Lemmy.world over. This would have one main effect: Bans gain teeth.

The problem that occurred last night is that brand new accounts instantly-spammed Beehaw.org. When Beehaw admins banned that account, they could instantly make a new account and continue spamming. By having a ~500 karma (or other such system) to delay the creation of new accounts into Beehaw, the admins at Beehaw.org will even the odds between the porn-spammers and their relatively instance

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