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I am currently working on setting up a non-profit and plan to operate the platform just like Wikimedia runs Wikipedia. I see non-profit as the only viable, sustainable alternative in the long run. I am planting a seed, hoping others will join and help me build it, and soon enough enable me to step down. I have a full time job on the side and a family to take care of, and running this as a one-man-show is not an option.

Tech stack:

keycloak (auth) dot net core 6 typescript + react react router 6 bulma

I plan to open source both the backend API and the frontend client.

API documentation: https://api.flingup.com/swagger/index.html

A penny for your thoughts? Comments?

As a long-time reddit user I applaud the idea. It looks cool and I personally think that you are correct that any kind of social media (for the future) that would not feed on its user base (ads and selling user data) should be offered by a non-profit. Personally I would not have issues if a non-profit would still offer ads it's social media site; they needs income as well, right? Just hope they would not offer the ad companies the data of it's user base.
Hey, are you aware of WT.Social? It’s run by Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia Guy) and he just released its second version. The philosophy of your product seems aligned with his. See if you wanna contribute or partner: https://twitter.com/jimmy_wales/status/1668266400723488769
I have a fairly negative/pessimistic take on this model, but it’s my truth: Wikipedia, in my experience, is littered with some of the most aggressive, psychologically manipulative, and persistent ads of any major site. They just happen to be ads imploring me to donate to Wikipedia.
> A penny for your thoughts?

when you open Reddit (or any of its clones) you see a bunch of posts. They may resonate to you, they may not, but you do see them.

Opening your site present me with nothing.

I agree that a non-profit whose incentives are aligned to support the communities and users that are on the platform is the right way to go.

Unfortunately also predicting a number of sites get stood up as competitors and then eventually pendulum back and forth until some sort of network-effect equilibrium emerges but this looks promising.

Not as familiar with dot net core and how it handles traffic scale up / DB reads. I'd gather it works OK for that sort of use?

On Safari, getting: "Timeout when waiting for 3rd party check iframe message." And nothing loads.

Works in Firefox though.

Interesting tech stack. Are you running on Linux? What's the hardware / cloud?
Why do the endpoints start with capital letters? It's the first time I've seen it and it's so unusual. Why?
I wonder how you plan to deal with certain types of content, like piracy, porn, gore etc.
Doesn't sound promising to me. Pretty sure that the "real" path to success involves putting 100% in, to the point of artificially seeding the posts and comments for weeks/months. "Social" means already having an enticing place for people, whether you make it or fake it. You sound like you've already given up and are done with the project. Referencing wikimedia is putting the cart before the horse, that's fine when you already have millions of views and sweet sweet non-profit cash, but getting there is the hard part.

TL:DR site is ok, will to win is not there

> Do not submit links or content with links to websites or businesses you own or are associated with.

> You may only submit content to which you are the copyright owner.

Interesting pair of rules!

I find rules like this tend to backfire.

If I write a technical, non-commercial blog I'm not allowed to promote it, and I won't.

But crappy commercial spammers won't follow the rules and will use sock puppets to promote content anyway. Which means seo spam becomes the most common post.

Ditto on this... I also wonder how this meshes with "You can share just about any kind of link in FlingUp." and "Anything goes on FlingUp." (from the tour)

It seems as though users may share links to whatever, but only content which they own. A difficult line to tread.

For the op, I would ask for a little more clarity on the intent.

(N.b. this might cause some issues posting AI-gen content, which is sans copyright by law, at least in the US. Maybe that's the intent?)

Basically, don't submit photos that aren't yours. That's what links are for.
I will support any platform to replace reddit that is 1) completely open source, 2) community driven, 3) moderators are held accountable by the communities they govern, and 4) not ad supported.

Social bookmarking is something the internet should have as part of it's infrastructure.

Unfortunately the fediverse face-planted in it's time to shine. The infra is the hard part and that all has to be controlled by the same org.

Would you like a pony as well?

Not only you have conflicting requirements (something to be part of the internet infrastructure while controlled by a single org) your comment gives absolutely zero constructive criticism. What about the fediverse was so bad that warrants anything like "face-planted in it's (sic) time to shine?" How/who/what are you supporting that is trying to get to the goals you listed?

I'd support the same, but I'd allow ads, as long as they don't sell user data, and add long as the company is structured as a co-op or non profit org, and have full transparency on what they're spending money on, and if there's enough kitty, give back to users who are the best at moderation, quality content etc...I think fediverse is too decentralized the best you can hope for is a DAO, built as a social enterprise, maybe every user gets to vote on major things with the company. the know karma, the more your vote counts, as long as there's a way to make sure there's no karma farms...
I love the idea. But, leaving aside the idea of federation (not against it, just aware that current implementations can't handle enough users to be useful) - how do you propose that infrastructure and developers should be paid in this model?

Look how hard Wikipedia has to fight for donations and how much pushback they get over it. Wikipedia is comparatively simple, infrastructure-wise. A nonprofit reddit would need a lot more money I think.

A lot of good advice can be found here with how Hacker News does things.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23439437

https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/blob/m...

Thank you, I’ll dig through this.
Looks pretty good and a non-profit seems perfect for something like this.

I do have to say, I really dislike the card design that seems pretty much ubiquitous at this point. By introducing a border, you need to add a bunch of padding and then margins. Between two titles, you have padding (from the upper card), border, margin, border(lower card), padding. It's so much whitespace!

How do comments work? Can you have infinitely nested comment threads? If so, I'm not sure your API will scale? Do you need to fetch replies for each comment recursively? That'll be a pretty bad experience, since you need to wait for one comment level to load before you can fetch the next one. But maybe I'm misunderstanding the API docs.

> I do have to say, I really dislike the card design that seems pretty much ubiquitous at this point

Maybe I'm showing my age, but honestly I think UI design for this type of site peaked at a list of blue links 20 years ago. It's actually one of the reasons I liked Reddit (and still love old reddit).

The comments can be infinitely nested. You can see the comment model if you scroll down to schemas: https://api.flingup.com/swagger/index.html
The UI is fantastic. Sleek and modern appearance with snappy response and pragmatic layout. Just made c/nba!

How do I follow a particular community?

That's very kind, thank you. The following/subscription is not implemented yet, I've been building this on the side, so quite a few features are missing but in the pipeline.
Tried to open it, it kept undefinitely in a loading animation, opened the web inspector, reloaded it and there only shows a Cloudflare message error saying that they blocked me from visiting it.
Do you have a VPN enabled by any chance? It loaded a bit weird the first time I opened it with PIA turned on. Worked fine after that, though.
There's currently an oddly similarly-titled post on the frontpage:

Show HN: Non.io, a Reddit-like platform Ive been working on for the last 4 years

Even the apostrophe from "I've" is missing in both. Odd.

This is the most seamless Reddit alternative I've seen today. And it's already getting a bunch of posts. I like it.
Why has everyone around here been writing a reddit-like platform for years? And aren't there a ton of those already? I used ieddit for a while (wow, correction) it still seems to be alive, www.ieddit.com.
I like this. A nice QoL improvement would probably be to add an alternate card view where images/videos are expanded by default; that's usually how I browse Reddit.

I'd be curious to see if the "no pornography" rule hinders growth at all. While I don't have actual numbers, I know from personal and second-hand experience that quite a lot of Reddit's (or the internet's in general) traffic is porn-related.

In any case, I hope this platform takes off and succeeds. I think a non-profit alternative to Reddit would be awesome.

Tried to register, got hit with a Cloudflare error.

Error 1015 You are being rate limited

The owner of this website (realm.flingup.com) has banned you temporarily from accessing this website.

Refreshing took me to an error page, which then tried to send me to:

http://localhost:3000/

Thing is, the platform looks like a great start, so I hope this can be fixed quickly!

Looks nice, but I can't register because Cloudflare hates Firefox users.

(I was able to register an account using Chrome)

Another Linux Firefox user chiming in to say I can't use the site. Permanent loading animation, developer menu reveals a hidden "You need to enable JavaScript to run this app." message that isn't appearing, even though JavaScript is enabled.
I like the snappy UI, but I think it needs a search box for communities/posts at least.
Title seems oddly similar to another Reddit-like post from today….

Show HN: Non.io, a Reddit-like platform Ive been working on for the last 4 years (https://non.io)

This one seems nice. It's better than the other alternatives that were posted here.

Probably needs a bit more modern UI but it's functional.

I don't use mobile, so I can't comment on that, but I can compare to old.reddit (the classic good version).

Overall it is decent, but there is still plenty of work,

Here are my comments, ignore if you don't agree.

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Content loading: Initial Page

old.reddit.com loads fast all content, without javascript. flingup.com instead is stuck on 5 blue bars bouncing because no actual content is loaded on first page. It is all loaded on some delay for some reason. Here is a thing: render content on backend, and if it is expensive, render it and cache it.

The only good thing is that flingup uses own subdomains, unlike reddit that uses other domains like redditmedia.com / redd.it / reditstatic.com . I hate companies that use alternative TLD because it is hard to discern if domain is real, or used by scammers.

Additionally, only 2 javascripts are needed to load flingup, and they are hosted from realm.flingup ... the other 4 seem to be some form of bloat. Basicaly, there is an iframe that loads something from realm.flingup on port 8443 and this iframe loads two javascripts. If these are so critical, why are they loaded through an iframe? why port 8443? why realm.flingup ? Sigh.

the good part, despite flingup being js based, it supports middle click / control click on links correctly, unlike plenty SPA. But not all items, can't middle click to see user profile, instead user has to normal click, which does some odd useless popup with an actual button to see user profile.

----

Content look: information density at 30%

old.reddit.com gives me 29 items I can see concurrently on my screen. Flingup only shows 9.

----

Content look: almost no comments loaded (25% of 40)

I will ignore the fact that most items are just links, not discussions. But lets use the top link "migrating from reddit" as example. It has some odd 40 comments, but only like 10 are loaded, because the remaining are hidden behind a series of 'there are 3 replies'.

Contrast this with old.reddit that will load 500 comments, up to ?8? levels deep (I counted up to 8, maybe more?) with a button to 'load more comments' either in a thread, or at bottom.

Paradoxically, my other complaint is no option to collapse uninterested thread, or to link to specific reply (aka permalink)

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Content: tooltips missing

I dislike the '2 days ago' as it doesn't say when. old.reddit provides actual time of a comment / post when user hovers over '2 days ago'. Flingup doesn't.

ps: fling sounds like a dating app.

Cheers

Do you plan to add downvotes?
Loads pretty fast from Europe right now and UX looks reddit-like.

Good first impression.

> Become a Flingon today!

I did! Looks slick. I hope you’re ready for the moderation gauntlet.

>> You need to enable JavaScript to run this app.

Sigh...

Has anyone found the easter egg yet? ;)
This is good
Is it connected with fediverse?