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Comment by bentxt | Hacker News Reader

One interesting (maybe obvious) point Louis was making: This company and brand is worth nothing without its user. There is simply no interesting tech here.

That leads to the question: What would it take to create a website that is similar enough, to make user instantly feel at home, but different enough to not get into legal trouble?

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You are missing the point? The hard part isn't to create the tech, it is to build a community, get a massive user base and get user that write interesting comments. There are plenty of Reddit clones, but they have to compete with each other and Reddit.

Would you mind sharing those you think would be the most promising?

lemmy is looking like it has potential. they certainly have some critical issues to solve before it's familiar enough for plebs.

The only one I found interesting was Lemmy. It looks like old reddit and it is built on the ActivityPub protocol. I've also looked into ActivityPub the last days and it seems very logical. Someone described it as email for json. The benefit is that any service on the Fediverse can talk to each other and users don't have to sign up for every service, they can just use their one identity if they want.

There are multiple instances of Lemmy. https://programming.dev/ seems like a good place to start for people on hackernews. Once you have signed up you can read and interact with other Lemmy instances as well.

The main problem they need to solve it to make it more user friendly and simple. I think a barrier for many users is to understand what ActivityPub and Fediverse is. They should put all that info in an about page, and present the login as any other web 2.0 app.

https://lobste.rs/ and https://raddle.me/ are "Reddit style" sites. Slightly different approaches to moderation and signup.

Lemmy and Kbin are the future I'd like. As siblings have said they're federated - you have an account on one, but you can subscribe to and interact with communities (subreddits) on any. This is the same way that Mastodon works - it's actually the same underlying protocol (ActivityPub).

Fork and deploy old Reddit

https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit

Why not? Would that be legal though?

Why wouldn’t? It’s open source

Reddit is a trademark but that’s another story

I think the code is less interesting then the (graphic) design and some of the wording (kharma) that people are used to. And maybe further expressions like AITA or /r/whathever. How is the legal situation here I wonder

The old code that reddit published says you have to put a copyright on any service that runs the software, so /r/foo would be fine, and the bottom of each page would say something like “Portions of server software copyright reddit 2017”.

I am not a lawyer, but that’s my reading of the license on that repo.

The Trump forum has split off to patriots.win and appears to use that code. I'm using it as an example of a fork, not because I support any of the content.

If they could shut that one down, they probably would try.

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