[superkuh]

That's because the first users pushed off any community and looking for alternatives are mostly genuine assholes. They're only the first but it makes it so "alternative" sites are really off-putting during their early days and this limits growth.

notabug.io was favorite reddit-alike: https://github.com/notabugio/notabug . It was designed to be both server<->server federated and p2p to bridge content between unfederated servers. But like above, it was quickly over-run with genuine assholes which made using it distasteful and it eventually died. The technology was and is amazing.

    notabug is a p2p link aggregator app that is:
    distributed: peers backup/serve content
    anonymous: but don't trust it to be
    psuedo-anonymous: users can create optional cryptographic identities
    immutable: edits are not supported for anonymous content
    mutable: edits are supported for authenticated content
    PoW-based: voting is slow/CPU heavy

[spondylosaurus]

That makes a lot of sense. I'd imagine one way to counter this is to be proactive with content guidelines and moderation (even if you take a light-handed approach), but content moderation is obviously a lot of work, so you either have pay people to do it or find people willing to do it for free. And then we're back at the Reddit conundrum, lol.

[kitsunesoba]

Yeah I think the only way you can get an alternative to a major social network site off the ground without it turning noxious in the process is if you can mobilize a sizable existing somewhat-grounded community to bootstrap it with to set the norms. This is hard to pull off though… even if you get a crowd that large through the door you've still got the uphill battle of attrition ahead of you.

[r721]

>it was quickly over-run with genuine assholes which made using it distasteful and it eventually died

Nobody knows what actually happened because the dev/creator stopped using all their known accounts in 2020, and yet the website was still working until Oct 2022 (see also comments here in case you missed it https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/zicasn/...)