List of social media alternatives | Hacker News Reader

List of social media alternatives

r.nf

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It's a bit like Ed Meese and pornography. You know it when you see it, but it defies definition.

Easy to Say "reddit alternative" but really it might not have the zeitgeist quite right. "It depends".

* if you want the dialogue how well it does thread and nested comment management is key, and thread hiding

* if you don't like moderation you're going to be accepting doxx, pile-on, racism, trumping, trashtalk and trolling.

* if the owner marries a tennis superstar or starts a rocket company or sells NFT it's not worth it.

I thought Mastodon was closer to Twitter-shaped than to Reddit-shaped?

Yeah, the decision to include some Mastodon instances (out of ~1000: https://instances.social/list/old) is a bit weird, but that's what list compiler (mod of /r/RedditAlternatives) decided to do.

The list has "very reddit-like (red)" column though.

I'd still argue its a misleading title, its a list of Active Social Media Alternatives, regardless of what the mod named the list.

I think the title should be changed to reflect that.

@dang any input?

Sure, we can change it. Too late to make a difference, but might as well.

IMVHO the sole Reddit (and HN) alternative is Usenet. For a reason: an "alternative" witch is essentially a clone of a platform with the same model (platform owner + users) is not an alternative. It's like when people rush out of GutHub after Microsoft purchase as Microsoft is a different beast than the previous owner and another company, like GitLab is "a better alternative".

Usenet is an alternative because:

- no one own "the platform"

- anyone can have hes/shes own messages on a personal iron

That's is. An alternative is something different that do the same thing IMO, not a clone or almost a clone with just a different owner or dress.

I've enjoyed rdrama.net as a good reddit replacement.

missed https://www.laarc.io/ (actually an hn clone but whats the dif?)

This list is also handy (open source reddit alternatives with links to github):

>Reddit alternatives sorted by software

https://ramble.pw/f/RedditAlternatives/4041/reddit-alternati...

Let's see, from the top down I found:

1) Far-right cesspool

2) Far-right cesspool

3) Far-right cesspool

4) Anti-trans "women's community"

5) Something actually decent

This was my exact thoughts

me as well, plus it doesn't list things like discord servers, but will list mastodon communities? just feels purposeful to mislead people looking for an alternative to reddit and dump them into purposeful recreations made by those who enjoy taking younger white cis men and women, and turning them into hate filled monsters.

Well, if it is the right that needs to evade censorship, it tells us something about who does it.

> Something actually decent

Which one is it?

Do you think the reason these sites exist is to "evade censorship" as opposed to any other reason? That's quite the assumption. Would love to see some evidence.

> Which one is it?

The list linked is ordered, so if you count down to #5, you will find mstdn.social

> Do you think the reason these sites exist is to "evade censorship" as opposed to any other reason?

I'm not sure what the other possible reasons are. Due to the network effects, you'd expect people to want to use the larger social media websites by default. And theses alternatives don't seem to offer anything special (except possibly having less censorship).

Four out of the top five sites on the linked list are filled with hatred towards other specific groups of people. For what it's worth, plenty of different subreddits on Reddit are also filled with hatred towards other people; just, mostly different sorts of people than these sites hate.

Seems to me that Reddit tolerates hating specific sorts of people and not others, so if you hate the sorts of people that Reddit doesn't want you to hate on their platform, then one of these other sites will allow you to hate those folks together with others who share your hatred. While if you hate the sort of people that Reddit thinks it's okay to hate, then you can find others to hate together with, without leaving Reddit.

On the other hand, it's easy to find communities on Reddit which have no hatred towards any other groups. The same cannot be said for the top four sites on this list.

https://lobste.rs has always seemed quite nice.

Only catch is that you have to be invited to create an account.

Keeping the community small is probably a big factor in maintaining a high signal-to-noise ratio.

There are lots of great small subreddits. Occasionally, one will become popular and it will all start to fall apart. L'enfer, c'est les autres.

Agree that lobste.rs is great, I only looked at the first five- the site is ordered by page rank.

Mewe.com isn't on that list.

ahh yes, mewe where you can find 90% of the funniest memes found on gab but with only 1 % of the antisemitism one finds on gab.

What is it tonight with the low effort posts trying to drive those who use telegram and reddit to right wing / hateful alternatives? I'll make a guess and that it's related to roe v wade and the political climate, especially with those insanely pro life, and by statistical chance, republican, aren't being welcomed on left leaning sites. So those people think this "rejection" is happening to everyone, when that is a flat out falsehood.

Its the "reality has a left leaning bias" and its being met with the same attempts to indoctrinate people towards hate. The only group of people who would feel quote 'persecuted' unquote are those who hold hateful and bigoted views.

I don't think theres anything majorly wrong with redditlikes/twitterlikes/federated mastadon sites. But the moment I see a random site telling me to use alternatives that only promote hateful views, I don't see it as valid. Regardless of the data used, sites like Gab shouldn't be given a spotlight since they refuse to even federate with other Mastadon servers.

I don't even want to get into how Gab is clearly a cesspool [1], the next two sites listed are 4chan twitter analogues, and the overite page is the terfs who were banned from reddit.

In this day and age, a reddit clone isn't the same as a digg clone. A reddit clone is mostly a "refuge" (rdrama being a great example counter to my terf/bigot point) for those who are banned from reddit. In reddits history, the only subreddits who get outright banned are those like /r/cringetopia /r/fatpeoplehate /r/thedonald

Communities that promote hate. And seeing such a clearly bad list on hacker news, I had to speak up.

[1]https://www.npr.org/2018/10/28/661532688/a-look-at-gab-the-f...

HN should be #1

No, please. The last thing we need is even more of the toxic diaspora from Reddit and the chans showing up here.

It's in "Reddit and similar established sites" section at the bottom of the list.

It's under 4chan and above digg.

That's how SimilarWeb estimated HN's traffic rank (numbers in "rank" column are clickable).

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