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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 |