[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.