I don’t expect it to make me millions, or even thousands :), but it’ll be an experiment to see if a completely non invasive platform can work. Costs should be small, so I can keep it going myself for at least a few years and then maybe Patreon or similar to fund it if it grows to need that
In some ways I’ve taken the opportunity to make things a bit better, the post editor has preview, moderations can be appealed, all moderations are public, the groups have hierarchy, edits can be viewed etc.
Anyway, a month or so and I’ll announce it, currently in test at blewit.uk, because they did.
There's a whole lot of help out there for getting things started, in fact the technology part isn't the difficult part - its the legalities and hoops you have to jump through to stay legal (which are mainly aimed at <generic big company>, not <joe schmoe>).
I've also taken a few decisions to keep things "lean and mean", so the hardware it requires is surpisingly modest, at least for getting going. Pushing as much as possible to the free tier of Cloudflare helps, and just one box behind the HA layer can manage ~1.3M req/sec if they hit the redis layer (which I ... encourage by design :). Even going all the way down through the DB and back, it hits 50k/sec - which is rendering, not i/o. That's ... quite a bit of headroom :)
funny that i wasn't getting anything useful out of it for some time
new version doesn't even work properly on firefox with ublock, comments almost never show up, video doesn't work...
To be fair, I guess Reddit won’t miss me either because I was only lurking the whole time.
They are going to lose casual posters as well.
But I guess Reddit had a good run and all things must come to an end.
Btw concept of SPA is probably more than a decade old by now, GraphQl has taken over in lots of places along the same lines.
Whenever old Reddit stops being available for members as well, that's my time to return to old school forums instead.
Google is the only search engine that works on Reddit now, thanks to AI deal | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41057033
How it's going:
AI Overviews could push Reddit to end its $60M-a-year deal with Google | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49032246
As Reddit stock falls, CEO questions value of Google's AI Overviews | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49145809
I've always thought of reddit as a "revolving forum" because it focused on regular turn over vs long term threads like traditional forums. I've been sad to see it try and fully shift away from forum appeals.
Currently hn, metafilter, tildes and some topic specific forums/discords plus a little searching online are meeting my needs but I'd love to hear what you folk have shifted to for places with forum appeals.
Hopefully it's just another A/B they drop after a week like in the past, but otherwise I may have to move on to another semi-anonymous doomscroller.