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I started to build an alternative: https://flingup.com

It’s not much, but it’s honest work. If all this does is create a tiny fragment with a hundred people, I’ll call it success. For now, me and a handful of people use it to share articles we find interesting.

3 comments

I love this idea, but the content I'm seeing on the front page right now is turning me off from using it. A lot of fringe political content (pandemic trutherism, Bud Lite culture war shit, etc.), which is not my idea of interesting since I can find plenty of that anywhere else.

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

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.

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.

>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/...)

A good reddit alternative needs to offer something fun. It can't just be a link dump/political soapbox, because reddit is already a link dump/political soapbox.

I know it's not popular here, but look at the success of TikTok. It attracts users because it's fun. People go there to laugh, enjoy themselves, and share stuff they've made. Sure, there is lots of politics on there too that users engage with, but that's not the main lure for them.

> A good reddit alternative needs to offer something fun. It can't just be a link dump/political soapbox, because reddit is already a link dump/political soapbox.

Huh? If reddit is a political soapbox for you, you're not subscribed to the right subreddits. They already offer something fun by default: the homepage consists of nearly only funny posts when I open it in a private tab right now. And that formula clearly worked

Reddit has lots of politics on the default front page, even on subs that aren't explicitly political. But my point was that a reddit replacement needs to have all the fun stuff that attracted reddit's userbase. It can't just be the political extremists who have been permabanned.

It is merely a tool, guided by the same principle Aaron Swartz implanted into reddit. Freedom of choice, freedom of expression, as long as the laws in the country hosting the servers are upheld. Communities can form and moderate the content as they please, but alternative communities can also form with perhaps less moderation. It is up to the users to make it what they want, not funded by advertizing, but rather with potential donations. It doesn’t have to be huge. If it gets too big, it should be able to split up.

Sure, I understand. Just providing feedback as a potential user of such a tool—personally, I'm not super interested in the current community it's attracting, and a hands-off approach to moderation seems like it's unlikely to attract the kind of community that I (or others with tastes similar to mine) would be interested in.

There's a couple neat glimmers on there, like the link about beekeepers, but if I wanted to hear conspiracy theories about Joe Biden or mean remarks about trans people I would just go on Facebook and see what my uncle's been posting lately :P

1% of your users will comment. If you want to have 30 articles per day, you need at least 3000 users if they post an article per day. Look at tiles.net, unless you focus on growing users, it will take some time. On the other hand, you could use ActivityPub in some way or form to offer content.

It's https://tildes.net/

Your website offers me to install a "Create React App Sample" app. Which makes me wonder what tech stack you are using.

It’s a react frontend with a standard API and a database, and Keycloak on top for IAM.