There's no content on the site. Seems like premature advertisement.
You should see if anyone has written any articles about network effects.
Rings.social – Reddit-API compatible and Open Source content-voting platform
11–20 of 43 posts
Re: Rings.social – Reddit-API compatible and Open Source content-voting platform
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
How exactly do you expect the content to reach the site before the users do?
I know this is a rhetorical question but with a compatible backend like this, could an app like Apollo pay the API fees to Reddit for historical posts, seeding content for the platform, and write subsequent posts to this new alternative database? That way you avoid the cold start problem, and the API fees to Reddit should fade over time as the content becomes stale -- the posts can even be sunsetted once native conte…
I absolutely love your idea but I can't imagine Reddit would contribute to their own demise.
Granted, a lot of the decisions they're making over there lately would indicate otherwise, so maybe they'll love the idea.
Side note, anyone finding good alternatives? Obviously I love this forum as it does feel more like Old Reddit. But it's scratching a different itch for me. I've been experimenting with the Fediverse and it feels like it's one great app away from taking off. I'm very interested to see this Wikipedia-adjacent project that is supposed to come out and be the new Reddit.
Re: Rings.social – Reddit-API compatible and Open Source content-voting platform
#13Unlike old reddit, this site requires JS to function.
I'm waiting for something minimal like tildes or hn to show up. These new competitors are too bloated.
Honestly a self-hostable HN clone, so no rings/communities/subreddits or anything, I think could be kind of cool. 1 community per server, so they stay naturally pretty small. If you find a post out in the wild, the domain name tells you exactly what the general topic is.
You could use activity pub to handle a “personal front page” that includes stuff from other instances per user.
Maybe a bit naieve but that’s basically what I’d want at this point. Maybe I just want ye olde hyper-focused forums?
Re: Rings.social – Reddit-API compatible and Open Source content-voting platform
#14There's no content on the site. Seems like premature advertisement.
Reddit founders used fake accounts to fake activity at the start.
Re: Rings.social – Reddit-API compatible and Open Source content-voting platform
#15Unlike old reddit, this site requires JS to function.
One annoyance about the UI (for me at least) is the real lack of information density. Hacker News manages to show 15 stories without even scrolling, while this manages to present... 3?
For starters, individual posts in the Explore view[0] are wayyyy too big, while not providing much information at all. Look at the Comments button, for instance: why is that on a separate line?
After 5 minutes of experimentation, I was able to condense the post item down to the following: https://i.imgur.com/KthkpPQ.png While it does have some kinks, it looks much better and presents a greater amount of information in about 30% less space. Low-hanging fruit, I'd say.
Re: Rings.social – Reddit-API compatible and Open Source content-voting platform
#16I don't understand the need for all the padding everywhere. I can fit 3 things on my screen, it makes me feel claustrophobic.
Agreed. I tried to remedy it to the best of my ability[0]; there's a lot of room for improvement.
Re: Rings.social – Reddit-API compatible and Open Source content-voting platform
#17One interesting challenge you could face is that there's a lot of pre-existing bots that are built against the Reddit API. As the site grows, those existing bot operators can point at your endpoint. You could struggle to keep up with spam.
Re: Rings.social – Reddit-API compatible and Open Source content-voting platform
#18Unlike old reddit, this site requires JS to function.
This is just one implementation of the frontend. You can literally use any frontend for this. We might make a minimal one :)
Re: Rings.social – Reddit-API compatible and Open Source content-voting platform
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm waiting for something minimal like tildes or hn to show up. These new competitors are too bloated.
i don't think most people care. or would care, ever, if the site worked without js. the people who care about sites running without js also don't contribute to revenue either. like genuinely i don't think there's a more miserable crowd to support, with stronger preferences.
100%. Techies are such an unrepresentative niche:
* Don't like to pay for anything
* overly privacy conscious and minimalistic
* highly opinionated, vocal and demanding in ways that probably won't help the mainstream (eg want high customisablity)
* high levels of autism mean they focus on irrelevant minutae, often perfectionistic. low appreciation of aesthetics
* accept things that are broken/way too difficult to use for non technical people
* dismissive of things that are easy if they could build them as well
Etc, etc
Re: Rings.social – Reddit-API compatible and Open Source content-voting platform
#20One interesting challenge you could face is that there's a lot of pre-existing bots that are built against the Reddit API. As the site grows, those existing bot operators can point at your endpoint. You could struggle to keep up with spam.
Good point!
Bots are definitely going to be a challenge regardless of the API