Ask HN: What are some of the best Reddit alternatives?
Ask HN: What are some of the best Reddit alternatives?
Honestly, I was late to the Reddit train, didn't join until 2015 or 2016 or so. I noticed a marked decline in my overall mental well-being but I really did feel addicted to it. For several reasons I stopped using it a few years ago and I can't think of a single thing that's worse off than before.
Unless you're running ads and using traffic from Reddit to fuel your business, you're not getting any value out of it. I'd see something on HN and it would be weeks at best before it would pop up on any of the technical/programming subs, and the conversation was always 1/10 the quality of here.
Speak for yourself. There are many great niche communities from which I have derived pretty tremendous value. The front page is generally worthless and toxic, yes, but that doesn't condemn the entire site.
r/ML had decent conversation at times, so did r/controltheory and r/RL and esp r/experienceddevs
Without apollo I … feel cured of my reddit addiction tbh.
I agree HN is better for the kind of subjects HN covers, but for others I tend to go to Reddit.
Yea that's really subjective and blanket statements are silly.
The real problem is not software but, as many pointed out before, building a community of communities that size is hard.
Personally, I believe the solution is aggregation rather than forming a “community”. Outside of maybe subreddit networks, there wasn’t a whole lot of connection between various redditors. You really can’t consider the entirety of Reddit one large “community” housing other communities. Instead, it was more akin to a fancy RSS feed, aggregating posts from various communities together under a standardized API with some unnecessary algorithms mixed in.
So, my solution would be to promote individuality in communities, with having separate websites, but to offer an open source website that houses links to various communities alongside their RSS feeds.
The only aspect I can truly say Reddit was good for me was the basics of archiving, personal finances, cooking, and frugality. And I’m sure there’s even better forums dedicated to those topics.
And am I the only one that finds this kind of response creepy? It says to me that you didn't like my comment for $REASONS, so you went to my profile to try to find something you could bring up. If it wasn't the karma it would have been the age of the account or some poorly aged comment from years ago.
Does everyone who has strong dislike of reddit stay subscribed to /r/news and /r/worldnews (and others)? I know those subs ruin my feeds and my mood. Otherwise, I don't see how reading something like /r/factorio can decline one's mental wellbeing.
I read books now, or the actual material reddit was talking about ("haha who reads the article amirite"), watch a ton of great stuff on youtube, read more discussions + submissions here. My life has improved considerably.
Which you could say about nearly anything in life.
I've been building a platform called Sociables which is intentionally not just a Reddit clone. We are trying to create an all in one place for people to create communities first and foremost and not just posts.
Here's an example of a community:
We felt that in order to fully capture each aspect of the community space, we needed to include each different type of communication tool. What I mean by that is we have a twitch style IM chatroom, Discord style voice rooms, and Reddit style discussion boards for longer form communication.
I'm not familiar with LaTeX rendering, but will definitely check it out to see if it's something that we could integrate into our platform.
You can lurk and read most forums without an account, decide if its a good fit or if it has things that interest you.
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
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 gating part is a work in progress). We are also adding the ability for users to pay to bump posts and buy comment awards which the revenue is shared with the community owner. Basically we are looking at adding ways for the communities to make money in ways that don't come at the detriment to the community itself.
We are also exploring offering a platform wide subscription fee that would give users some additional benefits as well however we haven't fully fleshed this out yet.
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.
The ceiling is a lot lower for a community engine than it is for a link aggregator. Google News vs. Google+.
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.
Personally, I'm going to check the project mentioned at the top of this subthread and look at other options that may already be out there. I just saw, also, some mentions of thoughts about leveraging"ATproto" ...
I am fairly certain that there are solutions that can fill the void left by Reddit's latest knife in the back of the users and communities that really made it useful and different. It's a little saddening, but not that surprising (aside from how long it stayed user / community friendly before basically declaring war on many users and communities) ... and, at this point, any pathos I would normally experience is being far outweighed by schadenfreude at seeing the site burn (in essence, if not immediately in the most tangible ways, though I suspect the arc of events should shave any potential valuation down to around 75%, perhaps, of the already reduced valuation vs. 2021) and determination to help further reduce its valuation. If Huffman and his milieu (above, adjacent, etc.) have defined everything, at this point, in terms of money, then that's the only language that they will pay any attention to.
But, away from the "Io voglio vendetta" thoughts, I like the idea of something like a "co-op" ... something it sounds like this "sociables" (makes me think "lunchables", heh) idea might be touching the edges of ... I definitely think the best of (old) reddit can be transferred successfully elsewhere by people who aren't after some kind of 90s-style SV gold-rush and Reddit itself can be left to rot / fester as it competes with TikTok, Twitter, etc. for the scraps of the divided attentions of mindless media consumers.
I've been building this with a friend in our free time over the past few years. We are in an open beta right now. We are definitely a bit guilty of delaying promoting it in favour of trying to polish things however the recent Reddit news really pushed us to start getting the word out. This project has really been a labour of love for me.
In regards to how we plan to monetize, just gonna repost this message I sent in another comment thread:
> 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 gating part is a work in progress). We are also adding the ability for users to pay to bump posts and buy comment awards which the revenue is shared with the community owner. Basically we are looking at adding ways for the communities to make money in ways that don't come at the detriment to the community itself.
> We are also exploring offering a platform wide subscription fee that would give users some additional benefits as well however we haven't fully fleshed this out yet.
It's federated with Lemmy and Mastodon, so posts from those platforms seamlessly appear in the feeds, and they behave as though it's all under the one Kbin instance.
But not vice versa.
Lemmy users cannot visit kbin.social magazines with capital-letters. Lemmy doesn't understand that capital-letters could exist in a name.
Kbin in general is super new software, there's a lot of nits that need fixing like this. It works surprisingly well considering how young it is.
I'm new to the Fediverse, so I don't know if kbin was planning on fixing their processing or if Lemmy was planning to switch to case-sensitive.
I guess devs are deciding upon case-insensitive largely across the Fediverse?
That's my understanding, but I'm just a spectator.
But maybe that is a good thing? Being a popular hangout on the internet seems to be a curse more than anything from my observation over the last decade. If an alternative reaches an amount of active users similar to the early years of Reddit, I would call that a win.
There was also a funny comment I read early on after joining, something like "only true Redditors aren't on Reddit" in reference to the earlier Redditors leaving in hopes of finding what was lost as it became more mainstream.
(1) Content hosting (2) Content browsing
This way, the /r/BikeShedding community can buy a domain, say, BikeShedding.gg, and connect it to a content hosting platform that delivers a standard API + web UI. This is (1).
Users will have an app, let's call it FrontPage, in which they can put it a domain to subscribe to, or pick from a list, exactly like we can use podcasts app today to either add a manual RSS feed or choose from the library of feeds an app offers.
Podcasts are the pinnacle of decentralization yet I haven't heard once the word "federation" or had to choose an "instance".
If someone wants to talk about this more, email to anything at weedon and scott [dot] com. I did apply to YC with this, but it got rejected -- maybe the time is ripe.
Edit: Important to note that this works for all platform overreach cases -- Avoiding YouTube censorship, exiting Twitter's echo chamber, and yes, for Reddit as well.
The problem with federated platforms like mastodon is that they are still platforms, and platforms suck. You replace horses with cars, not with slightly better horses.
This is due to the difference between one way vs 2 way communication. Blogs and podcasts chose the word "syndication" and you use an RSS client to subscribe instead of an instance that can talk back.
What your story doesn't deal with is accounts (not just logins). If you add that you pretty much land in the fediverse model (except in your story every subreddit would run their own userless instance).
The content creator/moderator knows that if the hosting service starts acting iffy, he exports everything to a different host, keeps the same domain, no one knows he even moved. Much smoother.
The problem with federation is not the technology, is that the technology is packaged as a platform.
The way I see it, each “subreddit” is an independently run instance that I can authenticate with. Once it’s set up, my client handles the details of automatically authenticating me when I’m interacting with that instance. I’m imagining it securely stores the domain and token for each “subreddit”, though admittedly I haven’t given it any real thought.
As long as every instance is using some standardized protocol / API you’re set. A system like this is not only dead simple, but it opens up the potential for all sorts of really amazing frontend clients.
In addition to that, each instance could have a lot of control over which features they’d like to expose. For example, whether or not downvotes are allowed. They’d also be able to monetize in a lot of unique and interesting ways that aren’t possible on a centralized platform.
I think there's a third piece missing though which is discovery/distribution. On reddit, popular posts from any sub can reach the front page, and perhaps more important, discovering new subreddits is a core part of the user experience. Users share new subreddits all the time, the site constantly pushes you to new ones, and they're easy to find with the search function. AFAIK Tapatalk doesn't do this, and it would probably not be welcome given the expectations they have with existing communities.
I decided to go for the beehaw.org instance, because I like their moderation model. The only problem I had was the registration, because there currently is a bug, where you aren't notified if your application was rejected (I only wrote a short sentence per question in my first application)
There is already work on improving the sign-up process, so hopefully this will be a smooth process in the future.
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 overbearing, you can ignore their actions.
- features mod elections so that the default list of moderators can be selected by the community; mod actions are auditable since they're sent to all peers so you can see what the mod has done.
- is text only by default. I think there's a feature to approve domains to have their content render in the app, but it is mostly a text based community
- doesn't keep the whole history of posts to the network. I think this is probably a development choice to make sure clients don't have to download terabytes of history just to view recent posts. It's marketed as being ephemeral and won't keep track of your brain fart posts made years ago.
- is mature. Posts on HN about Aether have been made as far back as 10 years ago.
- features proof of work spam prevention. Every action you make takes a little bit of computing power to prevent network spam.
> Peer-to-peer ephemeral public communities
From their homepage is god awful marketing - I don’t care about what’s under the hood I just want the content.
Tbh also not a fan of deleting content that’s more than 6 months old - a lot of the value of Reddit comes from when you find a new hobby you can look through old top posts to find the best info.
> Tbh also not a fan of deleting content that’s more than 6 months old
Agreed. Aether's idea is that the community will hold on to material that is important, likely by reposting.
7d ago: https://meta.getaether.net/t/aether-is-being-revived-as-some...
Someone tries to do something around it, I guess
What I want is a drop in compatible replacement backend. That would mean the existing clients could be supported with a base url change, and some disabling of functionality until it's supported. Bring across those 10 million users on the 3PAs. Pay for it by serving topic targeted ads over the api.
So far, so good.
This is the main problem with the whole decentralized system and it won't go anywhere besides being a niche.
Even if Reddit decides not to ban third-party apps I'm done with that site.
But I don't think there's much of a chance that they refederate with sh.itjust.works.
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So choice of server, as a user, absolutely matters in the Lemmy world. The more curated communities will be treated with a bit more welcoming than the fully 100% open instances like Lemmy.world or sh.itjust.works.
It's actually great that they can. And if they think a slower gated community is the best for them, well, let them be. I can't imagine how this constitutes a failure of lemmy.
What we need is to go back to basics and develop a simple link aggregator with basic federation. So that anyone with a federated node account can follow links posted to it, without having a local account.
Then of course each link posted can spawn a discussion, but no need to have that in the first version of the software. These discussions can take place in a decentralized space for the time being. Giving the software the advantage of simplicity.
For example the ActivityPub object Actor does not have to be a person, but rather a category of the link aggregator.
If you're looking for Reddit for big subreddits, or a way to get a broad overview of a lot of niche communities without necessarially engaging with the individuals in the community, then you'll probably have a hard time replacing reddit. But if you just want to find a place to discuss your 10 biggest interests, I am willing to bet most of them have at least 3 communities outside of reddit that are smaller yet still high quality. I am also willing to bet there are at least 10 that aren't as good.
One of the things I love the most about some of the niche communities I'm a part of -- discords, forums, email groups, physical meetups -- is that I feel like I have a much stronger connection to the people and have a stronger appreciation for the intersection of the community's shared interest and our individual lives.
Maybe this is all a bit too 'touch grass,' as far as advice goes. And if you really are just looking for a feed of good articles on interest X, Y, and Z, like a magazine personalized just for you, then you're going to have a rough time beating Reddit. I still try and curate a collection of high quality RSS feeds these days, but that's a pretty different suggestion.
Except Lemmy also adds in the Fediverse stuff, so there's a bit of drama with Beehaw.org and whatever. But as far as Hacker News types go, you probably should just sign up at programming.dev and have fun. (Programming.dev is its own Lemmy).
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"Lemmy" is roughly the threaded-chat style PhpBB-like web-app where you can create your own users and create your own subreddits (now called communities), and talk with everyone.
The Fediverse part comes in because programming.dev talks to beehaw.org, and both sides can crosspost, cross-comment, and seemlessly communicate with each other. But Beehaw.org is scared of new-users (such as those from Lemmy.world), and has cut off Lemmy.world visitors from their site.
So there's a bit of drama to resolve in the "greater Fediverse". But as far as "unique new instance", programming.dev is probably what you want.
If this whole federation / sharing of posts / sharing of communities works out, great. If not, programming.dev can sit by itself in a silo like the old phpbb forums.
I don't know how solid the backend is, but instances are crapping out on ~10,000ish users on smallish dedicated servers, suggesting severe bottlenecks in the code. Current discussion seems to suggest RAM bottlenecks and a lot of swapping.
Lemmy wasn't quite ready for the #RedditBlackout. But I think its still in a "workable enough" state to experiment with. Some communities (ex: Beehaw.org) are worried about growing faster than needed (human-side scaling, not machine side). Since Beehaw.org is trying to recruit specific kinds of people / posting patterns.
So I guess what I'm saying is... Lemmy tech stack is good enough for Beehaw.org. I dunno if its good enough for Lemmy.world (which is very "Reddit-like" in open enrollments / ease of community making).
I'm running my own news server now, which is easier than you'd think. Even if you don't run your own server (there's no real reason to) there are plenty of free public servers out there.
Perhaps the best way forward is to return to traditional, independently-hosted forums, perhaps with some sort of communally-maintained registry so that members of forum x can easily discover a new forum y.
Just go to show how bloated reddit has become
For specific hobby/trade subs, plenty of fora still exist.
For anything interesting in tech or medicine or law, I like this site.
If you just want to replicate the intelligence and attitude of the larger subs, Twitter seems an apt replacement.
I can't see the two other "replica" fediverse platforms (pixelfed, peertube) getting such a break (instagram / youtube respectively) though. These being run by big tech and having an army of content creators that try to make a living there have a different dynamic which doesn't fit the non-commercial ideology.
On the other hand some type of "commercial" fediverse might allow creators to keep a much bigger share of what consumers may pay. So you never know...
Also, unfortunately people in tech often fall into the trap of overvaluing their expertise in unrelated fields, so discussions outside the tech realm are often quite blindsided (guilty as charged). Of course there are the occasional gems of bioengineer or whatever chiming in on a relevant topic, but Reddit was very valuable at that simply due to its bigger size and more diverse audience.
https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes
Only thing is that it's invite only at the moment... And I seem to have too hastily deleted my reddit account to ask for an invite on their subreddit.
EDIT: Got one, thanks!
Note that I can't email back to Microsoft domains because they block the IP range I'm part of because of previous ownership and they don't give a fuck. Google should work, but treats/misclassifies most low-volume senders as spam by default so be aware to check that. (Haven't had problems with other email hosters.)
My thinking is that someone with online creations is more likely to have something to post, to be a contributor, compared to when I post the invite here for any lurker/voter to grab. Voting is good, but so far I'm kinda missing the broad offering of content on tildes that you'd see on reddit, things like amateur astrophotography in r/space or the OC in r/dataisbeautiful.
Edit: the invite is used, so I removed the email address. One person with a gmail address emailed me, let me know if you didn't receive the invite within a few minutes!
Kbin https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core
Lotide https://sr.ht/~vpzom/lotide
Lemmy https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy
Brutalinks https://sr.ht/~mariusor/brutalinks/
Those all (are supposed to) federate. I don't think federation in these communities is always ideal, drive by posting and what not, I think a better approach would be a client that can read your followed stuff from a local list. But some non-federating options are:
StackerNews https://github.com/stackernews/stacker.news
Comment Castles https://github.com/ferg1e/comment-castles
freedit https://github.com/freedit-org/freedit
There are lots more, some are great some not. There have been quite a few posted on this site in recent days. Some communities really just need forums or wikis, link aggregation and content voting aren't really always necessary.
I do believe communities should host their own sites. Some communities just don't have the interest to be viable long term, and Reddit was a way to externalize cost so that non viable communities can continue to exist. We see the results of that now, a company that isn't profitable due to bearing costs that nobody else is willing to bear squeezing users to try to stay afloat. This was always a temporary state of affairs. If you can't find a single community member dedicated enough to keep a VPS running, or with large communities, you can't scrounge up enough money from donations or whatever to keep the server running, that community simply isn't viable.
It’s my instance that I set up. Hoping to get some more people to join it.
Here is a post with some info about the instance:
Same goes for niche hobbies, Reddit seems to be by far the best option.
This obviously isn't big yet, but communities are forming.
Imho, be the change you want to see, and contribute to the communities you are interested in, so that other people feel more inclines to stay.
- What do you browse Reddit for now?
- What is your goal when browsing/interacting with a different platform?
I think it would probably go a long way to have answers to all these questions before any recommendations can be made.
As far as "broad Reddit alternatives" go, there was a discussion on this already a few days ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36293789 (372 comments)
(1) It used hyperbole: "Anytime you post something that someone doesnt like ..." Especially in comments that are critical, avoiding hyperbole helps to keep the discussion grounded and on-track.
(2) It used inflammatory language to describe people: "Reddit has gangs of goons/moderators". As with (1) above, this reduces the chance of having a productive discussion. (IMHO) that kind of insult also just makes conversation less enjoyable.
Meeting with friends.
Reading a good book.
Hawker.social a Reddit/Twitter alternative that I launched earlier this year https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36324953 16 points 1 day ago 6 comments
Show HN: Non.io, a Reddit-like platform Ive been working on for the last 4 years https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36296695 1933 points 3 days ago 586 comments
Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36293789 541 points 3 days ago 220 comments
Show HN: Sociables, A Reddit alternative that lets community owners monetize https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36299095 12 points 3 days ago 4 comments
Ask HN: What are the best Reddit alternatives? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36299388 4 points 3 days ago 3 comments
Ask HN: Is there any alternative to Reddit https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36291618 1 points 3 days ago 3 comments
Hubski – Another Reddit Alternative https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36300812 2 points 3 days ago 1 comment
Thoughts on Lemmy Reddit Alternative https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36301823 2 points 3 days ago 1 comment
Show HN: Valme.io, another Reddit-like alternative with monetary applause https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36299193 3 days ago
Ask HN: What are current (viable) alternatives to Reddit? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36287915 20 points 4 days ago 7 comments
Raddle – An open source Reddit alternative https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36288509 4 points 4 days ago 1 comments
Ask HN: How about a Reddit alternative where every community is a Git repo? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36282561 3 points 4 days ago 9 comments
Kbin: Reddit Alternative https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36270205 7 points 5 days ago
Beehaw: Reddit Alternative https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36270000 2 points 5 days ago
List of Active Reddit Alternatives https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36253594 8 points 7 days ago
Ask HN: What would it take to build an OS Reddit alternative? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36247323 1 points 7 days ago 2 comments
Tildes.net – an open source Reddit alternative https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36237240 3 points 8 days ago
Demo: Fully P2P and open source Reddit alternative https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36203610 316 points 10 days ago 231 comments
Ask HN: Reddit alternatives (that aren't Mastodon) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36199403 29 points 10 days ago 32 comments
Teddit – An alternative Reddit front-end focused on privacy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36144211 203 points 15 days ago 93 comments
Lemmy: Federated Reddit alternative with Mastodon integration https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36144761 3 points 15 days ago
Consider Reddit Alternatives https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36000935 4 points 27 days ago
Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16820036 154 points 5 years ago 123 comments
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 !programming@beehaw.org). By defederating from lemmy.world, it means that anyone registering at lemmy.world can't access !programming@beehaw.org.
Beehaw.org seems to me like tildes or Lobste.rs, where they're trying to create a carefully curated group of users. So the open-registration model at Lemmy.world is not currently compatible with Beehaw.org.
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Lemmy.one however, is a more curated list of users. But unlike Lemmy.world, Lemmy.one (and Beehaw.org for that matter) cannot create new communities. Lemmy.one also has a simple interview process (you have to answer the question "Why do you want to join Lemmy.one" before you're allowed to join their group).
My recommendation: try to join a "trusted" server, like Lemmy.one, that has broad access to different Lemmy-instances. Lemmy.one may not match your philosophy, but find one that does.
Lemmy.world, and its "open registration" policy is likely best for any Reddit refugee who wants to play with Lemmy. Since registrations (and community-creation) is fully open, you can get started in less than 5 minutes (No interviews, no worried about online philosophies / political slants, etc. etc. Just create an account and go). But this laisse-faire has led to spam-bots being created on Lemmy.world, and those spam-bots coordinated a porn-invasion of some Beehaw.org groups. So Beehaw.org doesn't want to deal with users from that open instance. As is their right in the Fediverse.
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So yeah. Its not quite as easy as people are making it sound. But its really not that complicated either.
1. Join a "trusted server" if you're into that. Lemmy.one could be a good starting point. I see others here are recommending programming.dev (also a Lemmy instance, and likely with "good behavior" rules to stay in Beehaw.org's good graces).
2. Join a "freeform server" if you're into that. Lemmy.world is one. But note that you'll be less trusted and less likely to access !programming@beehaw.org. Actually, there's no reason you can't joing #1 and #2 at the same time, because freeform servers like Lemmy.world have a much easier time on "creating new subreddits" (aka, easier to make new communities to experiment with).
3. Spin up your own instance. It seems like beehaw.org is still allowing most hobby-instances federate with them. This seems to be one of the better solutions, as your own instance can get all the large curated communities from beehaw.org, but also the freeform communities at Lemmy.world or sh.itjust.works
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Sorry for exposing "Nerd Drama". But I think its important to think about how Lemmy and its community plans to deal with this problem. There will be more trolls (and coordinated trolls) from different servers attacking each other. I mean, I used to play video games where we launched DDOS attacks at enemy guilds. Online trolls are just assholes like that, and the question of how to build tactics to counteract hate-brigades is interesting.
Even if I don't agree with anything Beehaw.org is doing, I still support them from the perspective of "I wanna see if they can figure out a solution to this online-hate / spam / trollfest problem" using Fediverse tools. And I think they have a shot at solving it.
So this makes Lemmy _very_ different from Reddit. I think the ol' Reddit philosophy was to grow thicker skin and try to ignore the trolls, recruit more moderators to stand guard and click the ban user button 1000 times as 1000+ spam users bombarded you. But I'm glad that Fediverse offers a new tool (ie: Defederalize) that is between a "set instance to private" and "keep things public" mode.
But its clear that the community is still learning how to use these tools, how to organize our community with those tools in mind, and what tools need to be built so that everyone's happy.
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kbin.social is another Fediverse that's somewhere between Reddit and Twitter (or Lemmy and Mastodon). Due to case-sensitivity on kbin.social, Lemmy bugs out on CaPiTaLiZeD@kbin.social groups, but both are Fediverse and there's a degree of cross-comment activity.
Ultimately though, kbin is likely to remain segregated from Lemmy due to these incompatibilities, and I don't see them fixing it unless they start from scratch and somehow get lemmy+kbin to agree on names (lowercase only vs case sensitive). I'd say give kbin.social a try as well, there's something to be said about trying to be compatible with Mastodon and maybe using the larger Mastodon instances to seed that community.
There's curated communities like Tildes, Lobste.rs, and of course Hacker News. But I don't see these as Reddit replacements.
Beehaw.org fits itself in a weird spot. Its Defederating, so its kinda-sorta like Tildes or Lobste.rs, setting itself as private and making it harder to join to help curate the users. But its still theoretically possible to federate to them (ie: through Lemmy.one, but not through Lemmy.world). I'm going to keep a close eye on this drama to see how the community resolves it.
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 interests.
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.
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
https://lemmy.ml/ (https://join-lemmy.org/) : ideal reddit replacement
https://www.tiktok.com/ : from a purely entertainment value. This is number one. I was on TikTok last year and it was basically the only entertainment site I visited. I actually did not visit reddit last year - it felt like day old news since so much (entertainment) content was coming from TikTok.
https://mastodon.social/ : I need to get use to Voices/People first over actual story. Reddit (HN) was always article/story first. Probably why I never did Twitter.
https://kbin.social/ : good reddit replacement.
https://flingup.com/ : I quite like this one as a reddit replacement.
https://www.instagram.com/ : created my first acct here. Not sure what to expect. Seems boring and fake.
https://tildes.net/ : invite required: requested one - still waiting... Really quite nice: feels as if reddit and HN merged into one.
https://www.4chan.org/ : actually surprised that normal categories exist. I always thought it was just one giant cesspool.
https://9gag.com/ : lots of ads, tracking but captures the meme-aspect of reddit.
RSS Feeds continues to be my personally best (and tailored) solution.
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https://www.quora.com/ : did not like.
https://hive.blog/ : looks nice but do not like the crypto/payment aspect of it.
https://imgur.com/ : Will not let me browse while using a VPN. Bah! Fail.
https://non.io/ : pay to interact. I think many (like me) don't post enough to justify paying - when other sites deliver so much more.
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I may start looking at BBSes again. Excited at the thought of this.
I have been on IMDB for a couple of years. Writing reviews, creating lists, taking polls. Just saying there's a ton of stuff out there if you're looking to fill downtime and have fun. IMDB has been great fun for me.
https://the-federation.info/ : good place to find Fediverse sites.
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New ones I came across just now (for review):
https://rdrama.net/ (seems wild at first glance)
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Many of us (especially me) stopped looking for a while. We find one thing and stick with it. Reddit serves as a reminder that there are 'plenty of other fish in the sea'. Let's go fishing...
I don't browse it anymore, and there are some really terrible boards, but if you can sift through a lot of the nonsense and memespeak, there are a lot of interesting folks on there with nuanced opinions or knowledge on more obscure hidden gems of your interest. There have been some valuable knowledge dumps there in the past, and a lot of boards have a dedicated wiki/pastebin full of great information.