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Comment by BucketSort | Hacker News Reader

Is there a decentralized version of Reddit that allows you to own your subreddit? I recently got burned where a sub I created was taken from me without explanation or warning and when I reached out to the admins, it fell on deaf ears. The idea that you have no ownership over your subreddit is bearable until you get burned and realize how crazy it is. Same thing goes for YouTube.

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There is, Aether. (https://getaether.net)

Funnily enough, it also implements some of the stuff mentioned here, like public visibility of moderation log so the users can see what mods are doing, and with which justification.

(Disclosure: I’m the creator - prior HN discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18370208 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19161171)

Very cool. We need things like this. Maybe to help with on boarding you could make a part of it be a reddit interface so I can just use Aether like a superset of reddit. Just a thought. Good luck with the project!

I can't find the source on the site. Can you please add a github link? https://github.com/nehbit/aether

I had to go search in some reddit thread to find it since if you search for aether you get a legacy project from Eclipse.

Also the source on github does not appear to be up to date with the version that is download from the site. (2.0.0-dev.6+1811211332.746ec27e.d on git hub and the one I downloaded is 2.0.0-dev.11+1903010147.3fd391a3)

It's not really an open source project (at least right now.) He's developing in a private repo and pushing releases to github every now and then. I don't want to speak for rolleiflex but he has mentioned in other threads that he is working full time on it and isn't really interested in public contributions or the politics involved of maintaining an open source project at the moment.

Link to aether thread: aether://board/86e782e80681ac580b4d6d102b12e787c066e59f194fee57bb0bf83cc1e42fc6/thread/e4871294ed115310e029a3b4c37b378ffefa7de490ef5b58bb1aeb1b1cbbea1e

This seems really cool. Checking it out! Though, your logo reminds me of https://studyroomf.fandom.com/wiki/Greendale_Flag

That's a principle reason I'm preemptively moving from Reddit despite other strengths of the platform.

There are othr issues.

See:

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/8rq08y/i_wont_...

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/20yhxc/reddit_...

https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus/comments/acg9zf/alternativ...

Can you explain how and why a subreddit gets taken away?

I'd imagine it's like accounts, where it can happen without explanation or any reply when you ask for one.

I didn't get an explanation. I'd like to know as well.

reddit.com/r/redditrequest lets people request control of a subreddit that has inactive moderators

I created the subreddit and brought on moderators I watched over for years, then about 8 months ago I was removed suddenly without any warning or reason. When I reached out to the admins they replied with an automated response. It truly pisses me off because this was a good will project for me and I was an archangel of the sub. It only started to bother me that they did this when the usurper mods started supporting a third party platform in an effort to potentially move people off the sub, which I found to be suspicious and now I can do nothing about it. It really left a terrible taste in my mouth.

Any moderator who is inactive for 60 days can have their moderated/owned reddits reclaimed.

As an example, Tales by Toxlab (https://old.reddit.com/r/TalesByToxlab) is a subreddit of personal stories by a single person ... who died in 2016. By Reddit's rules, anybody could claim that sub for any purpose.

The xkcd sub was taken over by Holocaust-denying neo-nazis (https://www.dailydot.com/news/xkcd-reddit-moderator-drama/). That was eventually recovered.

I've maintained a sub since five years, and yet haave now ownership in it. For a sub that's merely topical that might be acceptable, but this sub is not.

You can pretty easily run your own forum!

You don't get the discoverability of these platforms in that case.

So, you want all the benefits of reddit, without any of the drawbacks, and for free?

No, decentralized and p2p. A commenter above has created a project that seems to fit this bill.

Yes, it's called the web. Reddit's source is free [0], and you can host your own (sub)reddit, which no one will be able to take away from you easily.

[0] https://github.com/reddit

We need the discoverability Reddit provides.

This is just reinventing webrings haha

"All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again" - Goethe

Tremendous quotation. Thanks.

Ironically, the discoverability reddit provides was originally as a link sharing site. Says a lot about how reddit has changed that this isn't considered as true anymore.

That's an old version, that's no longer getting updates. (It stopped being opensource a while _before_ the redesign.)

> (It stopped being opensource a while _before_ the redesign.)

That's actually good. The new Reddit design is a dumpster fire, and something I would not myself want to inflict on other human beings.

The old layout continued to get updates for a while after it went closed source.

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