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by Nathan2055
1102 days ago
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Reddit is effectively just a text-only forum (image and video uploads are fairly recent features, and the latter has never even worked properly) with subthreads and a voting system. Text forums have effectively been solved ever since NNTP was invented. All HTTP forums are pretty much just centralized recreations of various components of Usenet. With modern databases, load balancing, and infrastructure management, the cost of building, hosting, and maintaining a web forum is effectively negligible. The only real selling point of Reddit is having all of your forums in one place, with the ability to easily and instantly create your own forum if you want to. Everything else on Reddit is just a random collection of social media features bolted on to appease investors/advertisers/stakeholders, and the vast majority of Reddit users (or at least the ones I interact with) never touch any of them. The only thing keeping people on Reddit are network effects. Which, admittedly, is a lot, given that’s what’s allowed Facebook to weather its seven quintillion controversies with minimal damage, but a well-designed successor with enough server capacity (this is very important, crashing under the initial migration load has been what sunk a number of previous high-profile “Reddit killers”) could easily take Reddit’s place. |
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Yes, and you should use that. I even have NNTP service with newsgroups for my own projects but they are not used much, so far. I would hope that other people can easily set up their own forum (like you say is possible with Reddit), possibly with any number of remote services which have NNTP access as well as HTTP perhaps, and if you set up an account then you can set it up and it can also be federated. ActivityPub and other HTML-based forums are not very good I think, and NNTP is much better in my opinion (although bridging can be implemented if it is desirable, some things might not work very well in all protocols e.g. ActivityPub only works with Unicode). (There is one change to the protocol which I think should be useful, which is to allow 63-bit article numbers instead of 31-bit article numbers. My own server and client software implements this feature.)