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:
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.