[cpeth]

Is Lemmy the leading candidate for a viable reddit replacement? Are there any other serious efforts in this space?

HN has such an insane depth of talent that I am surprised I haven't seen a few ShowHN posts that read something like:

"Hi guys, I was bored last weekend so I thought it would be fun to build a reddit clone as a single Rust binary with an imbedded bespoke graph database. It uses a fine tuned LLaMA model for optional auto-moderation. So far it's handling sustained 1.6M / posts sec on my 2015 MacBook Pro. If I have some time this next week I will add distributed mode with Raft or CRDTs. Hope you guys like it."

[reaperman]

The people who would enjoy building a reddit really don't want to run a reddit. The people who want to run a reddit, shouldn't.

[derefr]

Why would building it require running it? It's just software. There can be a separate installation of it per community. Like WordPress, or any old phpBB forum.

> The people who want to run a reddit, shouldn't.

The people who want to run something that's like Reddit.com, shouldn't, sure.

I don't see why e.g. a YouTube content creator shouldn't be able to have "a Reddit" (i.e. a single-subreddit installation of Reddit) in the same sense that they have "a blog" or "a Discord." The whole point there is that it's a cult of personality, so the moderation incentives align with the user expectations.

I also don't see why a community like /r/AskHistorians wouldn't be excellent at running "a Reddit" of their own. (In fact, that would be much better than currently, as they could run a very heavily modified fork of Reddit that uses a moderation queue for comments; requires that toplevel comments on posts are either follow-up questions [according to some LLM] or come from verified historian accounts; allows questions to be merged; etc. ...Hey, wait, that's just StackExchange!)

Also, did you know that LessWrong.com used to be "a Reddit"? That is, it was a single-subreddit fork — I believe the only one ever allowed, as some one-off gesture — of the proprietary Reddit codebase. It worked pretty okay for that community! (Though it never received updates from "upstream", so it code-rotted, which is most of the reason they moved away from it. This wouldn't happen in an open-source Reddit project.)

[MSFT_Edging]

I think the "subreddit" form being the decentralized aspect to a greater hub would be a better format than lemmy, which is basically a whole reddit that can attach to other reddits. Want a community? Run an instance equivalent to a subreddit for your topics. Want an offtopic or a circle jerk sub? two more instances.

The only real censorship power the main hub would have would be a de-listing, but it wouldn't take down the instance entirely.

[kaszanka]

Reddit actually used to be open source until mid-2017: https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit

[ris58h]

> There can be a separate installation of it per community.

"Reddit - Dive into anything". You will kill the UX with such separation.

[derefr]

I don't know what you think of Reddit as, but I think of it as two things:

- a collection of independent niche communities that are just using Reddit for hosting, whose members don't think of themselves as visiting "Reddit" but rather as visiting those specific community forums. This is the valuable part of Reddit, that generates and gathers original content and novel discussions that can't be found anywhere else on the Internet. This is the part everyone's rushing to preserve/archive or migrate elsewhere.

- a Usenet-like set of generic default-subscribed "category" subreddits, that just act as content aggregators to bubble up the "least controversial" stuff in each category from across the Internet. Nobody cares much about this (other than Reddit's investors), since it's just another view on the same content that gets surfaced through every other social network one way or another.

If you think of Reddit as just the valuable part, and forget about the junk, then you can reinterpret the Reddit UX like so: Reddit just happens to have a single-pane-of-glass view for a feed of multiple communities' posts, just like Twitter has a single-pane-of-glass view for a feed of multiple accounts' posts. But 1. this isn't crucial to how users engage with these communities; and 2. you could preserve this property anyway, by having a shared SSO system (like how WordPress.com works) and by making Reddit-the-software federate its posts through ActivityPub. Then a "Reddit client" would actually just be a fancier kind of RSS reader that also knows how to post to individual communities' servers. But each server would still be "sovereign" over its own administration, being able to ban or approval-queue users, etc.

[timerol]

> Reddit just happens to have a single-pane-of-glass view for a feed of multiple communities' posts, just like Twitter has a single-pane-of-glass view for a feed of multiple accounts' posts.

I disagree with the "just happens to have" part of this. The single-pane view is the killer feature of Reddit for me. I've tried to engage in smaller forums before, and small, niche communities have valuable but infrequent content. Being able to see which of the small communities have fantastic posts today is valuable, and encourages me to participate in some of the less headlining posts.

For a good example, consider /r/ultralight, which is a backpacking community focused on keeping weight off your back. 90% of the posts are "Help me shave weight! (The 10 pound lead weight I carry is sentimental and non-negotiable.)" Slightly more interesting are new product reviews, and the best are overviews of product categories.

I would not visit a standalone forum for once-a-month interesting content. But I'll definitely follow the sub, which leads me to 1) see all of the most interesting posts, and 2) engage with newcomers occasionally when I'm on reddit and nothing else is catching my attention. ("You really don't need the lead weight - just carry a picture of it for sentimental value.")

[derefr]

Let me put it another way, by making an analogy to a service that (surprisingly) does this one thing correctly: Tumblr.

Tumblr "just happens to have" a dashboard, but that doesn't really matter, because each blog also has a web subdomain that serves both the blog's posts, and serves a (public, unauthenticated) RSS feed for said posts. Which means that I can just subscribe to all the Tumblr blogs I care about through my RSS feed reader of choice (which is a single-pane-of-glass I control, and one which muxes together many other posts-once-a-month sources as well) and forget that the Tumblr dashboard exists.

And the Tumblr dashboard itself also doesn't need to be operated by the same company that hosts Tumblr's blogs. It could just be a fancy RSS reader, that uses Tumblr's API only for posting. And so it could be a third-party app, without needing to make any (authenticated) API requests to Tumblr, when all a user is doing is consuming content.

[ris58h]

> I don't know what you think of Reddit as

A set of subreddits that people browsing casually.

I don't think that there are many communities that live only on Reddit. Most of subreddits are pretty casual. Even niche ones. Niche communities already have other places to have discussions. They aren't core audience of Reddit. The core audience browse a 'junk'.

[dsir]

> I don't see why e.g. a YouTube content creator shouldn't be able to have "a Reddit"

I've been building a platform to target this specific thing. It seems like the biggest asset that creators are creating are the communities that form around them and their niche. In order for a creator to capitalize on this they currently tend to leverage a combination of different platforms like Patreon, Discord and Reddit with their community often times spread out amongst the different platforms. What we've done is combine everything into a singular place to allow them to offer their communities as a product alongside their content.

https://sociables.com/creators/

[derefr]

I would note that YouTube/Twitch content-creators create subreddits for a very specific reason: they ask their communities to share links to "relevant" content there, and to upvote the links that the community would most want the content-creator themselves to see. Then, when the content-creator feels too lazy to make real content, they instead start a screen-recording + video session, sort their subreddit by "top - this week", and start clicking through the posts and live-reacting to them.

It's in theory equivalent to a "share things for me to react to" Discord channel — but the fact that it's Reddit means that it has automatic chronologically-segmented userbase-wide voting rounds applied to the links, which makes it easy for the content-creator to react "blind" to a bunch of "interesting" things in a row, without needing to do any pre-filtering for things they haven't seen yet, or editing out boring things, or showing anything that would break content-guidelines on a livestream.

Does your software have an answer to this use-case?

[dsir]

So within a community on our platform the creator can create different discussion boards for all the relevant topics related to their niche. Within those discussion boards, posts can get "bumped" to increase their relevancy within the board. We have an aggregation feed as well which shows the most relevant posts across each board within the community. We are working on expanding the ways in which we aggregate the most topical posts across different time spans for the reasons you mentioned.

As far as content moderation, we are leaving it mainly up to each community to self moderate. We are also looking into leveraging AI to assist with flagging posts for the moderators to review to help improve their job.

[quaintdev]

People keep suggesting Lemmy but I think decentralized social media is preferred by technical people like us. But in real world only centralized social media seems to work. So why not adopt a model that will be good in the long run, how about something like Wikipedia non-profit Reddit alternative?

Someone already did this [1] as stackoverlflow alternative

[0]: https://codidact.com/

[holler]

There already is a wikipedia social network created by Jimmy Wales himself.

https://wt.social

[kkarakk]

Serves a 500 error if you try to sign up

[s1k3s]

I have a 1:1 clone of old.reddit in my PC already, I built it for fun a few months ago. It's a one week task for a senior web developer anyway. The thing is though, most people don't care about these changes and will continue to use reddit with their official apps. It's just not worth the stress IMO.

[mandmandam]

> most people don't care about these changes and will continue to use reddit with their official apps.

Yeah that's probably what the Digg execs said, and StumbleUpon, and the Myspace guys before that.

"Most people" will take notice when the people who made Reddit worth looking at leave. It might linger for a while, with rehashed posts from bots and the like, but it's walking dead right now.

[polski-g]

Reddit was worth looking at because the creators were literally starting up fake accounts to ask/answer questions. This could probably be automated with GPT in today's age to make Lemmy or whatever a possible migration path.

[riku_iki]

> Yeah that's probably what the Digg execs said, and StumbleUpon, and the Myspace guys before that.

it was early days when audience consisted of internet geeks. Today its also a lot of casual users who may not care about api drama much.

[KingOfCoders]

And then there is IP blacklisting, prevent login after 5 tries, rate managing, all the edge cases ...

[samstave]

And thus, 'reaperman's law was born.

[armchairhacker]

Personally I think the best alternatives are what we’ve already been using: discourse, Matrix, Mastodon, Zulip, Github Issues, and community forums.

For finding new interesting content, I strongly believe that instead of creating a new platform someone should create a “hub”: a centralized aggregator which presents all of these platforms in a consistent format. A place where you can find various forums and Zulip / Mastodon instances, get a feed of their posts, and even create accounts and make posts/comments; but it doesn’t host the instances or posts themselves, it just uses their APIs. It can also host some of the archived / scraped data from SE and Reddit for consistency. The reasons being:

- The platforms I mention already exist for many communities, and there’s already a lot of difficulty in finding content. This has been a good idea way before platforms started closing off their content

- Creating a fully-centralized platform is actually way harder than creating a decentralized one. At the same time, it’s very important that whatever platform we use is easy for newcomers, easy to find content, and fast; all properties of centralized servers. Hence, the centralized entry-point and hub but decentralized instances works well.

- Mastodon has a centralized hub but tbh it sucks. Discourse, Matrix, Zulip, etc. have none. And of course there’s no hub which supports all of these platforms together.

- I’ve only heard bad things about Lemmy and the UI is crap.

I would absolutely love to help such a project but, like many unfortunately, don’t have the time or networking ability to start it myself. But if I see a Show HN or something similar which seems like it’s actually getting momentum I will try to contribute

[pig208]

Interesting idea. In a sense this is also kind of "decentralized" in terms of hosting because you are just using the APIs, and the service itself will just be provided via a client managing the credentials. But I don't quite understand how this will be so different from Matrix has been doing. Basically, the application is just a centralized hub with bridge to different communities. Wouldn't this just be a "yet another standard" situation?

[armchairhacker]

Yes.

What makes this approach really stand out is that, even if there are 5 different aggregators, it doesn't matter, because they're all aggregating the same data. And even if someone decides to use one of the existing platforms (e.g. discourse), posts/comments from this aggregator to the platform still show up. So this is actually a way to alleviate the "yet another standard" issue (though I acknowledge it won't be as good as a single common instance, due to different formats).

Matrix is a start. But when I go to https://matrix.org/, I see a giant header and "Try Now". When I go to https://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix-now/, I see a bunch of clients. When I go to https://app.element.io/#/welcome and click "Explore Rooms", I see random forums including some russian forums.

I think that you go to the site hub, you should immediately see a feed of curated popular posts and a "Create Account" form, similar to https://reddit.com/r/all, along with a search bar and list of filters. And when you create an account, you choose some suggestions and get presented with various communities, also like Reddit. Most people are barely even going to try your site, if you want them to join and put real effort into contributing you need to present good content as fast as possible.

Another issue with Matrix is that a lot of content just isn't on Matrix. As well as Reddit and other existing communities. For example, Rust has a subreddit, discourse, Matrix forum, and Zulip, and probably a discord somewhere too. There should really be a single platform where I can see posts from all of this, because I'm definitely not going to be checking each one individually.

[bsnnkv]

I created a read-only version of something like this[1] to view discussions across subs/hn/lobsters/tildes/substack for any given link. I really like the idea of what you're suggesting.

[1]: https://lgug2z.com/articles/finding-interesting-comments-dis...

[not_a_shill]

The hardest part about making a new reddit isn't the technical side

[danenania]

Exactly. It should be more like:

"I hacked this together with the worst code you've ever seen and the server is crashing every 5 minutes, but a thousand people signed up today and usage is growing exponentially."

[cpeth]

Hmm I assumed the opposite. The mass exodus of long time users who are pissed about the API changes won't happen until there is a destination that can handle the migration without servers going down. It will be interesting to see what happens.

[danenania]

Focusing on tech and scalability before getting users will just result in a well-engineered ghost-town. People would rather use something slow and buggy if that's where the activity is.

It's much more of a marketing and PR challenge than a tech challenge. Having a site that works well would be nice too, sure, but finding a way to get tons of users signed up (and keeping them engaged) is far more important.

[ArjenM]

Time will tell where majority groups migrate to, I'm mostly afraid it will be ever more fractured islands that slowly fade for a good long while before one dominant platform slowly gains traction again as was the case with Reddit.

Lemmy looks a little too technical for majority users to consider I'm afraid.

[gnoop]

That's looking to be the case. Same thing happened with Usenet and the migration to web forums because Usenet became a complete mess.

Some are going to Tildes. Some are going to Lemmy, though the two most popular servers are dying right now. Enough went to kbin.social that they disabled registration. Then there's mentions of Raddle and Mainchan depending on your preference.

Discord servers with forums seem to be the big one from what my oldest was showing me. Seems that plus some additional web forums will end up filling in the gap.

Reddit will probably still last for a while as it bleeds out users. We'll have to see what replaces Reddit. Nothing proposed so far is going to be the new consolidated home.

[dt3ft]

I’m building one, but I don’t think it merits a Show HN. You can check it out at https://flingup.com

[busymom0]

I am the developer of HACK, hacker news app for iOS, android and MacOS, one of the top hacker news apps on the app stores. I have been working on a decentralized link + text sharing site called AvocadoReader for last few weeks. I describe it as a “Decentralized public community of communities for sharing links, text and media. “

I am hoping to have an extremely early beta next week. Here’s what I have so far. Got the post submissions and community creations working:

https://imgur.com/a/mim2X9H

I shared some implementation details here if people want to read more:

https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13x0hzo/been_wor...

[derbOac]

Looking forward to this. I hope it goes well.

I read through those threads a bit, but I'm wondering if you can say a bit more about why you didn't use the nostr protocol as is? I'm not trying to pull for criticism, I'm curious about the tech choices and how some of these emerging options differ from one another (I think I've read about two other nostr forum ideas now?)

[busymom0]

Nostr is pretty good and I was inspired by its idea. However, I didn’t like a few things and that’s why I decided to build my own protocol.

1. Nostr relies on Schnorr scheme for signing the data. While from my research, the patent on it has expired, I also read some other details on how there’s other pieces of it which are still patented. I am not a legal expert, so my understanding on this might be wrong and it might be in the clear.

2. Schnorr is fairly new and not used widely yet. It’s not even built natively in Crypto Subtle which comes built-in in all browsers.

Based on this alone, I couldn’t use Nostr. My implementation uses ECDSA P-384 keys which can be generated using the browser built in crypto subtle library:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/EcKeyGenPar...

So this allows one less third party library to rely on the client side.

3. The 3rd reason (and this was one of my biggest reasons) was that Nostr runs on websockets. I didn’t like that at all. Servers are already limited on the number of sockets they can handle. Plus it seemed like unnecessary complexity when vast majority of the developers already know how to use REST api.

So instead of websockets, mine uses a simple REST api with only 2 endpoints: one for creation of records and other for searching for records based on filters. I shared more details here:

https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13x0hzo/_/jmkpll...

And here:

https://old.reddit.com/r/nostr/comments/142v4lu/_/jnasose

[b33j0r]

Haha, I’d say just wait another day.

But what is the value of reddit anymore? I have one of the oldest accounts, and I loved it.

Last time I logged in (not a joke) it told me I had a new free avatar that was a girl? That I’m stuck with? And I had to pay money to make myself look like a dude?

And we thought hats in TF2 were lame.

[dsir]

I've been working on a platform with a bit of a different take on the online community space. We've built a place to monetarily incentivize ownership over the communities created on the platform and have been specifically targeting content creators to get them to offer their communities as a product alongside their content.

The communities that form around content creators tend to be high in engagement and are a sort of naturally occurring beacon for connecting like minded people together online. That is the core of social networking after all.

https://sociables.com/creators

[holler]

There have been and will continue to be numerous alternatives created all the time. The problem is creating a clone of X is rarely ever going to succeed, simply because cloning products doesn't create a compelling reason to leave the original (unless you have the resources/network effects of e.g. Meta). You can check r/redditalternatives for a constant stream of projects.

[hedora]

This exists:

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

[timeon]

Sometimes best alternative is just absence.

[mayormcmatt]

I think the closest analog is Tildes.

https://tildes.net/