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Comment by strenholme | Hacker News Reader

The problem with Retalk is this: It’s closed sourced.

If we want to talk about Reddit alternatives, I would rather we look at ones which are open source, including Reddit itself until 2017 [1], the Mastodon Twitter-like web app [2], Discourse [3], Lemmy [4] (use a fork [5] if you can’t stand the slur filter), and the old school PHP discussions boards like PhpBB [6] and MyBB [7].

[1] https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit

[2] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon

[3] https://github.com/discourse/discourse

[4] https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy

[5] https://github.com/innereq/lenny

[6] https://github.com/phpbb/phpbb

[7] https://github.com/mybb/mybb

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> use a fork [5] if you can’t stand the slur filter

I'd rather not support the ecosystem at all if they pull stunts like this.

If it was possible to write an effective slur filter, I would not find it completely objectionable. Not because that would be useful to stop people saying completely shit-headed things if they really wanted to (I strongly suspect you could get the entirety of Mein Kampf past that filter), but as a "people who use these words are not welcome" signal, which definitely has some value.

As it is, it's bashing the problem with regular expressions, and doing so badly. I mean, some of those words actually have completely different, non-offensive meanings in certain communities & contexts. (One of a few I spotted: Last time I used "retard" was in the context of ignition timing...)

Writing an effective slur filter is undesirable. No one can stop people saying completely shit headed things. For one, people just work around it. And more importantly for every shit headed thing you restrict you also cut out someone else, even if it's just because of their perception of constraints. The mind has a funny way of editing thought before it even arrives. We can't afford this anymore in our online spaces.

There's also a language problem: "retard" is a common word in french which bears no insult in it and simply mean "late" like in "being late to work".

Allow me to add one more, built by me, which is closer to lemmy in functionality being also built on top of ActivityPub: https://github.com/mariusor/go-littr

A test instance is at https://littr.me

Also see https://sic.pm and https://github.com/epilys/tade for a web no-js link aggregator/mailing list/nntp solution

There’s also https://tildes.net/

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