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Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit
Today's subreddit strike showed me just how reliant I've become on reddit including my local subreddits and adding site:reddit.com to all my web searches.
Going forward, are there any good comprehensive alternatives to reddit?
- jamescodesthing 3y agoWhy don't we all just chuck a post in a gist and use the comments to chat?
- BlakeSimpson 3y agoNothing that is at the same scale as Reddit. The only real alternatives are niche forums which have been around forever now.
- hazebooth 3y agoI’ve seen https://tildes.net/ https://tildes.net/ pop up but it’s invite only atm I think, would totally be down for an invite from anyone here though :)
- raisedbyninjas 3y agoI liked the discussion there. Some people claimed they were subject to capricious bans though.
- scrollaway 3y agoI call BS on the "capricious bans". Tildes bans rarely (only one person has ban power on the site), and when it does, there's some discussion around it. See for example: https://tildes.net/~tildes/15my/new_users_ask_your_questions_about_tildes_here#comment-86ls https://tildes.net/~tildes/15my/new_users_ask_your_questions... Occam's Razor: If someone got banned, it's more likely that they were being an asshole than that the admin of a site that's been running peacefully and smoothly for 4-5 years is suddenly on a power trip.
- SkyPuncher 3y agoI'm really enjoying tildes. The community/culture is correct. Just needs more content (which will come with time). I as well would love an invite.
- frizkie 3y agoYeah. Seems like it could really benefit from a larger user base, but obviously they understand that and are taking it slowly. I'm also open to an invite if anyone is feeling charitable.
- scrollaway 3y agoYou and GP can send me an email for an invite (see profile).
- SkyPuncher 3y agoThank you so much! I sent you an email. As an aside, do you get a bunch of spam from having your email semi-public?
- scrollaway 3y agoMy email has been public for ~10 years and running on Google Workspace for just as long. I get roughly 2 spam emails / day. Maybe 1-2 false negatives and false positives per month (both these rates have been getting worse with gmail).
- SkyPuncher 3y agoOh wow. I get the same amount of spam with a completely private email.
- lelanthran 3y agoIf anyone here wants to send me an invite, my email is my first name at gmail.com. My first name is 'lelanthran'.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dabluecaboose 3y agoTildes is great but it's a lot more analagous to HN than reddit. The moderators are limited in number and absolute in power, you can't make new subs (I asked for a few and was declined), and the community is more tight and discussion-oriented (which is a good thing IMO, but I never quite felt like I fit in so I don't comment often).
- SantalBlush 3y agoIt has some nice things going for it, but it has a few issues that can be off-putting. 1. People are discouraged from being too negative about posts, but posting negative articles is fine. This led to people occasionally linking articles containing invectives about some subject they didn't like, but you're not supposed to respond to the article with invectives. It produced a natural asymmetry in the conversation and felt really passive aggressive. 2. The long post format is a noble goal, but personally I couldn't see the incentive in putting in a ton of work to craft a thoughtful, researched, and thorough post only to have it read by maybe 20 people then buried after a day. If I'm going to put that much work into a piece of writing, I'll create a blog where it will at least have some more permamence. I think in the end the long post format attracts people who enjoy the process of writing itself--which is fine--but it simply doesn't equate to higher content. A lot of the opinions in those long posts are still underbaked, and the length doesn't improve them. Tildes threads can be a grind to read while producing little information.
- scrubby 3y agoI just glanced at it, but Tildes feels like reddit did 14 years ago.
- cryoz 3y agoTildes is amazing!
- slashtab 3y agoI can...but where?
- shusaku 3y agoThe discussion there looks very good
- harry 3y agoa few first come first serve: https://tildes.net/register?code=UBZX0-DBQOR-H2W6A https://tildes.net/register?code=UBZX0-DBQOR-H2W6A https://tildes.net/register?code=IYUPP-2VZHD-EPZWM https://tildes.net/register?code=IYUPP-2VZHD-EPZWM https://tildes.net/register?code=TW3P3-YK0LZ-L7FLY https://tildes.net/register?code=TW3P3-YK0LZ-L7FLY https://tildes.net/register?code=MAUNA-6IE43-OY86X https://tildes.net/register?code=MAUNA-6IE43-OY86X https://tildes.net/register?code=8RC2T-40G03-AFSYF https://tildes.net/register?code=8RC2T-40G03-AFSYF https://tildes.net/register?code=INH4U-7HC5H-AESTL https://tildes.net/register?code=INH4U-7HC5H-AESTL https://tildes.net/register?code=92S7J-WQR3B-I7OQJ https://tildes.net/register?code=92S7J-WQR3B-I7OQJ
- mamoul 3y agoThanks!
- dr_monster 3y agoThey are all used now, unfortunately.
- pndy 3y agoThose who got invites should be able to invite more folks > "Most of the existing users have the ability to invite others, so if you know someone that has an account, you can ask them for an invite." https://tildes.net/login https://tildes.net/login
- Aachen 3y agoTakes somewhere between 48 hours and a week to generate the first invite codes, though. (Those are the two closest moments at which I checked before and after I had invites available)
- pndy 3y agoDo you know if a single account can invite people all the time or there's some limited number of generated invite codes?
- Aachen 3y agoInvite, slightly obfuscated: uggcf://gvyqrf.arg/ertvfgre?pbqr=LD8C3-NL8XQ-Q28BV
- skilled 3y agoThere are some listed here, https://stackdiary.com/reddit-alternatives/ https://stackdiary.com/reddit-alternatives/
- halfbrite 3y agoScale comes with time and engagement - right now, nothing is at the same scale. If the API costs, accessibility issues, and lackluster mod tools issues are not resolved in a timely and amicable manner, the scales will change as they have done time after time. The current VC investors should also consider if the existing CEO is fit for the role, given their apparant personal attacks and defamation against a third-party developer, and the public proof that these were unwarranted. A lot of the existing alternatives skew to the left or right of the political spectrum. The ideal platform would welcome all, and not witch hunt one or the other. Tildes seems to fit that but is invite only. Squabbles also, but it's not /quite/ the same as Reddit. Forums are the way to go for now. What I would love to see is a hand-picked curated list of forums, a la dmoz but for social, with reviews.
- yett 3y agokbin.social
- shagie 3y agoComprehensive? No. Nothing even comes close to the scale that reddit has for the niche that Reddit has. For local things, consider instead Facebook groups and nextdoor... not that I think that those are good alternatives. There may be a slack channel or discord group too - though those fill different (but often similar) roles. One of the issues that you'll see with this is that you'll need multiple accounts to handle the disparate sites (well, many of them have a sign on with Google or Facebook) - there's no "one stop spot for everything". And despite claims of power hungry mods on reddit, it becomes clear why something is needed if you spend any time looking at Nextdoor and Facebook.
- MaximilianKohlr 3y ago>Comprehensive? No. Nothing even comes close to the scale that reddit has for the niche that Reddit has. Saidit is a publicly funded, opensource alternative to Reddit, that uses the same old.reddit code. For anyone who doesn't like the Fediverse, Saidit seems like the best option.
- hughesjj 3y agoI've seen Lemmy paraded around, it ha promise but you gotta diy your community. My biggest concern with the fediverse is trust. Trust takes a while to establish. Looking back, man usenet's format was kinda similar to reddit wasn't it? Usenet with voting. Idk about y'all but this is actually kinda super fun. I'd love to reintroduce some modernized takes on old school platforms. The internet was more fun before everything got consolidated anyway.
- Buttons840 3y agoLooking at Lemmy instance sizes was a kick in the gut. I thought for sure there would be tens of thousands out there on various forums, but it's more like hundreds. The monoculture is worse than I thought.
- shmatt 3y agoTo me Reddit is FB groups with voting. So does that make Usenet similar to FB groups?
- gremlinsinc 3y agoReddit is also like one group per topic(generally), I mean there's branches of topics and breakaways but in general there's usually a main sub on a topic where you might have 50 Facebook groups. it's nice to have more silod content, IMHO.
- shadowgovt 3y agoI thought the Fediverse is a non-starter because a critical mass of the admin base and userbase are openly hostile to searchability, which punts "discovery" right out the window. Reddit has been building utility as a storehouse of decently-curated answers to questions that Google can crawl. Fediverse content can't fit that use-case if admins kick out crawlers and users are terrified of having things they post be found in the future.
- The_Colonel 3y agoTrust is very important e. g. Facebook or even Twitter alternatives. For reddit alternative, not so much. I don't care about my reddit profile, I rotate them frequently anyway.
- williamDafoe 3y agoDid you ever hear of groups.google.com? About 30Y older than reddit, the original Usenet groups system started in the late 70s ...
- e40 3y agoGoogle has completely messed up the archive. When they first took over, I could find my earliest posts from 1981 or so. Last time I checked, my earliest post was listed as some time in the early 2000's. Pretty sad, really.
- phpisthebest 3y agogroups.google is not usenet... Google EEE'ed
- openweb 3y agoGoogle groups is from early 2000s. It just hosts old usenet archives.
- the100rabh 3y ago[dead]
- yellowapple 3y agoThe Fediverse/ActivityPub world has a few options: https://codeberg.org/fediverse/delightful-fediverse-apps#user-content-link-sharing-forum-and-group-apps https://codeberg.org/fediverse/delightful-fediverse-apps#use... Lemmy is the best-known in that list, but Kbin and lotide both look pretty promising, too - making my decision of which to spin up as a personal instance much more challenging :)
- mariusor 3y agoBrutalinks doesn't? It's right there at the top. :P
- yellowapple 3y agoThose three were the ones I was able to try out (and that seemed to work reasonably well). Do you have a sample Brutalinks instance running somewhere? If so, then happy to give it a whirl and add it to my list of options :)
- mariusor 3y agoThere is a demo instance where I test the latest code[1], but my purpose as a developer is to make the project better not to admin/moderate a discussion platform. My hope was that communities come together and put up their own servers. [1] https://brutalinks.tech https://brutalinks.tech
- yellowapple 3y agoI dig it; you've made my self-imposed task of "figure out which of these I like best" that much harder lol Noticing that it's more like HN than reddit, in the sense that there's no equivalent to a subreddit AFAICT. Fine for my purposes, but are there any implications around that when it comes to federating with e.g. Lemmy or Kbin (which very much do have subreddit-like subtopics)?
- 3y ago
- JC770 3y agoslahdot.org
- worrycue 3y agoSlashdot is really more like HN's predecessor. Mostly tech news focused. It faded in popularity after Digg became a thing and allowed all sorts of topics.
- guerrilla 3y agoIt was around long after Digg became a thing. It's downfall was being bought by Dice media.
- worrycue 3y agoI remember it being a thing before Digg too. I visited it less after Digg got popular.
- guerrilla 3y agoOh yeah, Slashdot is from 1997. Digg was an infant in 2004.
- squarefoot 3y agoSlashdot was rocking in the late 90s when Digg didn't even exist. I started reading it when it was published by Rob Malda as his personal blog on his own server in his own dorm room. Along with Usenet, webrings, blogs, the original BoingBoing and the Illiad strips at userfriendly.org (dead, search for archived pages on archive.org) it is among the places of yesterday's Internet that I miss the most.
- guerrilla 3y agoYou must have misread what I said; That it was around long before Digg is not mutually exclusive with that it was around long after Digg.
- kybernetikos 3y agoReddit does two things really: 1. Link Discovery 2. Discussion There are a few options for Link Discovery. I have a bunch of fora and sites hooked up to an rss reader (the old reader, since google shutdown reader) which does pretty well (although I'd like it to do a bit more). The link discovery thing is like the equivalent of having channels on your TV. You can stream any program (website) of a huge number but a channel gives you a reason to think about a specific one right now. I've been looking at https://pinboard.in/popular/ https://pinboard.in/popular/, but it doesn't support rss which is a shame. There's really nothing to compare with reddit for discussion of the links though (and that includes scoring and karma and responses etc). And a big part of that is because of network effects. Reddit is where the discussion is happening, because it's where the people are because it's where the discussion is happening. What's really awkward here is that some of the alternatives have ended up as seeding around communities that were too toxic for mainstream reddit. That toxicity will make it harder for them to grow. I do find myself wondering what a system that connected my rss feed reader with global comments about webpages might look like.
- stinkytaco 3y ago> I do find myself wondering what a system that connected my rss feed reader with global comments about webpages might look like. Newsblur has this. It would probably be fine with more people. Occasionally there's something interesting, but usually there's no much of anything.
- kybernetikos 3y agoafter you and another commenter suggested it, I checked it out. It does look pretty interesting. Unfortunately I can't find any way to import my OPML so I'm a bit stuck. The discovery of feeds contrasts rather poorly with my podcast player. And forcing me to manually copy a whole bunch of hard to find urls one at a time is not a fun onboarding experience.
- stinkytaco 3y agoIf you click the gear in the bottom right (at least of my screen) the menu that pops up will have an option called "Import or upload sites". That has an OPML upload option. It's a cluttered user experience, though fairly configurable once you've started to find your way around. It's definitely a kitchen sink style tool, however. EDIT: It's bottom left, sorry. I browse the web in a mirror.
- Glench 3y agoGod what a mess. If anyone else is interested I made a browser extension you can use to batch delete your Reddit posts and comments: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bulk-delete-reddit-posts/nbfdoajmaaohkohdnbpjakamhcaaleco?hl=en&authuser=0 https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bulk-delete-reddit... Let me know how it works for you if you try it! Still fixing bugs.
- zigman1 3y agoI really hope not a lot of people does that. Looking for knowledge or guides i don’t want to be stuck with the worst part of the internet as what blogs have become. There’s a reason all of us are using site:reddit.com.
- Glench 3y agoYeah, that's totally reasonable. I guess it comes down to personal choice. Do people want to leave their content / writing with a company that doesn't have their interests in mind? There was more discussion about this exact issue in the thread about Shreddit from the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36257981 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36257981
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Masema 3y agoUnfortunately, the alternative is to let Reddit continue to profit off content contributed by users who Reddit has now decided to spurn. A lot of people are using Reddit's data request form to get a copy of their own content before deleting it. Maybe somebody could set up a site where users can send in their personal backups, and they can be combined into a sort of 'shadow Reddit'.
- sebstefan 3y agoCould you make it edit them to an AES256 encryption of itself? That way it's reversible Much better way to protest I feel like
- snarkyturtle 3y agoIt doesn't have the hyper-local capabilities that reddit has but metafilter.com deserves a shoutout. It has an established community, has been around for _ages_ and is a good replacement for /r/all and the like.
- cryoz 3y agoNow there's a name I haven't heard in a while. Seems to be still going strong. Clickable Link: https://www.metafilter.com/ https://www.metafilter.com/
- EscapeFromNY 3y agoThere's a list here https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/ https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/ Or there would be, if reddit weren't offline
- stronglikedan 3y agoAw, man, you just tricked me into giving them a hit on blackout day! I thought they were really offline. (they aren't)
- EscapeFromNY 3y agoSorry lol. They were offline when I posted though https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36294244 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36294244 https://downdetector.com/status/reddit/ https://downdetector.com/status/reddit/
- Oreb 3y agoMore specifically, does anybody have a suggestion for an alternative to the /r/worldnews subreddit?
- AlecSchueler 3y agoIf you're wanting the links it could be an idea to check the sub on archive.org and add the different sites that appeal to you into an RSS feed. No option for the discussions though.
- cwillu 3y agoNot a direct alternative, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events isn't the worst thing in the world.
- Eumenes 3y agoIts literally just news.google.com or bbc, with propagandistic bot spam
- pjc50 3y agoAside: I notice HN has been really slow today, possibly due to people not being on reddit coming here instead.
- AlecSchueler 3y agoWould be really curious to see a breakdown of the traffic increase on HN today.
- stronglikedan 3y agoGuilty! I mean, I visit both everyday, but I have been here more often than usual today, trying to get my fix.
- Zetice 3y agoCheck out an app called Artifact, if you're looking for that infinite scroll on published articles relevant to you. It's made by the original founders of Instagram, and they're using AI in some interesting ways, e.g. rewriting clickbait headlines. Their Reader View is nice too, though I wish I could set it as default on each page open.
- CharlesW 3y ago> Check out an app called Artifact, if you're looking for that infinite scroll on published articles relevant to you. Artifact is interesting, but it's an alternative to something like Google News or Apple News vs. a Reddit substitute.
- Zetice 3y agoDepends on what you used Reddit for.
- cryoz 3y agoUnfortunately, lack of a website I can use on my desktop browser makes this unusable for me. Also I am not sure any of the user generated content on this app would be discoverable by search engines. I fear it will be locked in forever.
- aquova 3y agoIt depends what you're looking for. To replace the link aggregation features, I've gone back to using RSS over the past year and I'm pleased with it. I get the same news that is spread across the various subreddits, and often times news sites will report on stuff directly from reddit. For the actually discussions or more niche content, there isn't much. There are some Reddit-specific alternatives popping up, but unless Reddit itself really dies I doubt they'll get much traction. Your other options are the other social media platforms, which have their own issues and aren't quite the same.
- voramok 3y agoWhat RSS reader would you recommend?
- FullMetalBitch 3y agoIf you selfhost freshrss
- carlosjobim 3y agoNet News Wire is absolutely great on Mac and Iphone.
- dabluecaboose 3y ago>To replace the link aggregation features, I've gone back to using RSS over the past year and I'm pleased with it. That does replace the literal aggregation feature, but how do you go about finding good sources for your RSS feed? I'm genuinely asking. I mucked with RSS lightly a decade ago and dropped it largely because of reddit.
- PMunch 3y agoI've seen RSS been brought up a couple of times. But I wonder how people use it. I use RSS, but for news and such I don't want to follow specific sites, because they just tend to post way too much stuff I don't give two hoots about. I've tried in the past and compared to the articles voted forth on Reddit it just feels like digging for gold in a garbage dump.. Are there any curated feeds? Or even something like a feed based on voting?
- tensor 3y agoI would love to see an alternative that really focuses on moderation. Perhaps something that has three flavours of subs. 1. Public: these would be democratically run forums. The users would actually be able to vote for moderators, and perhaps even rules around them. This would be ideal for things like r/[country] or r/[city]. 2. Private: these would be traditional forums run by the people who found them. It should also be possible for the "person" who runs it to be a corporation or similar group. 3. Personal: This would be a users own "twitter" like feed. Other things I think would be needed are: 1. The owning company be a foundation like wikipedia, run as a non-profit. 2. The data and code should be open, so that if anything happens a clone could be setup. 3. Site wide minimal content rules set by the owning foundation. There are some things that should not be allowed at all. 4. Built in trainable AI agents. Moderation is a huge task and I believe it's on the site to supply appropriate tools. By trainable agents, I mean efficiently integrated machine learning models that moderations can personally update and train per sub to help them enforce the rules.
- redmerchant2 3y agoDemocratically voted mods will never work for any moderately sized forum. The problem is the forums would be brigaded by terminally online “interest groups.” See how the alt right infiltrates gaming groups. The reasonable voices are outnumbered and taken over.
- haunter 3y ago>See how the alt right infiltrates gaming groups Goes both ways (if you insist to use the traditional political compass). GCJ is a perfect example of that. I use the "terminally online" word for these people rather.
- redmerchant2 3y agoI agree but I’d caveat the equivalency. Sure GCJ and other overly leftist subs are annoying. But there is a world of difference of spamming “[video game] is secretly about trans fem boy communism” by GCJ types. Vs alt right groups talking about (real life) minorities not deserving equal rights. Subjectively, I avoid any overly politically forced sub. However let’s not push the “both sides” argument.
- lucasyvas 3y agoThe one being promoted the most on migrations subreddits is Kbin (particularly kbin.social for sign-up). It federates with Lemmy as well - apparently some folks think the Lemmy devs have questionable moral character so decided not to promote Lemmy as a primary option (hell if I know, didn't look into it). That Kbin instance is getting slammed and trying to scale up right now - many identical /r/{subreddit} are now available at /m/{subreddit} (m for magazine) thanks to some of the prior subreddit mods I guess?
- SkyMarshal 3y agoSeems there are complaints about both dev teams - Kbin devs are apparently fascists or something in that vicinity, and Lemmy devs are apparently tankies or something in that vicinity.
- all2 3y agoLabels and infighting is easy. I wonder if they are actually fascists or tankies. Also, what is a "tanky"?
- cheald 3y ago"Tankies" is a perjorative for hardline communists, particularly Stalinists.
- shagie 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie > Tankie is a pejorative label for communists, particularly Stalinists, who support the authoritarian tendencies of Marxism–Leninism or, more generally, authoritarian states associated with Marxism–Leninism in history. The term was originally used by dissident Marxist–Leninists to describe members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) who followed the party line of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Specifically, it was used to distinguish party members who spoke out in defense of the Soviet use of tanks to crush the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the 1968 Prague Spring uprising, or who more broadly adhered to pro-Soviet positions. --- It's been expanded to include those who support other authoritarian left political philosophies. It tends to be anti American. A quick rule of thumb is "if you picture the parades in the country featuring a large number of tanks, those who support them are likely pejoratively called 'tankies'".
- samuraijack 3y ago[dead]
- creamyhorror 3y agoHN has been timing out, oof. Too much redirected traffic I guess
- sebstefan 3y agoI use https://raddle.me/ https://raddle.me/ but it's small for now. They seem to have a much better approach to moderation at least but the API is lackluster, but it's open source so hopefully it should improve
- smazga 3y agoI don't know how accurate or up-to-date this list is, but it seems like a reasonable place to start. It's an attempt at mapping subreddits to places in the fediverse. https://browse.feddit.de/ https://browse.feddit.de/
- sharperguy 3y agoI see reddit less as a website and more as a collection of communities. Each community has its own set of reasons for hosting itself on reddit vs other locations. Therefore I would predict that in the absence of reddit, not every community would move to the same place. I also noticed that in recent years many subreddits have increasingly been taken over by memes and other low quality posts and so users looking for more substantial content have already moved elsewhere. But some others have still been the best places to get early information on certain topics. For example /r/stablediffusion had a lot of people posting their novel uses and techniques for image generation. The QR code topic which is now blowing up here was already being talked about on reddit a week ago.
- 8organicbits 3y agoA directory tracking where different communities are migrating (or trying to migrate) would be awesome. With Reddit down/private I can't go on Reddit to coordinate the migration outbound.
- basch 3y agoA directory of best communities on the internet sorted and nested by topic would be great. A web directory 3.0. Whether they are on Reddit, mastodon, phpbb, discord.
- dabluecaboose 3y ago>I also noticed that in recent years many subreddits have increasingly been taken over by memes and other low quality posts and so users looking for more substantial content have already moved elsewhere. It's incredibly frustrating to discover a potential new hobby, check out the subreddit, and go to the top posts all time, only to find pages on pages of low-effort crossposted memes that are often barely relatable. It's also super frustrating being in one of those hyperfocused niche hobby subreddits and getting memes, and people treat you like some sort of wet blanket if you voice any opposition to low-effort content.
- setgree 3y agoMy ideal reddit alternative is spending less time on my computer and more time on in-person interactions. We can look for and/or build Reddit substitutes, but just my 2c, this is a fine prompt to question not just the instantiation but the concept itself.
- fasterik 3y agoThey serve different purposes. You might not be able to find even one person in your local area who shares your specific niche interests, but on the internet you can find hundreds or thousands of the most engaged and knowledgeable people on any given topic. Online forums also serve as a repository of knowledge that you can search through and learn from.
- 0zemp3c 3y agoTHIS! most of the political/activist/policy-driven discussions on reddit have no impact on the real world and lots of energy is just dissipated into typing that goes in to a db and no further case in point...most local subs are mobilized against NIMBYs...but NIMBYs tend to voice their concerns at City Council meetings (where it matters), not on the internet...guess who wins? reddit just takes the energy out of activism and dissipates it
- johnnyanmac 3y agoWhile I agree, I certainly don't go on reddit expecting political change. It's at best good for awareness, but you can't be stuck on that first step. To talk about media, hobbies, and maybe even to foster professional skills. I feel those were the most valuable communities.
- karaterobot 3y agoI agree with everything you say, except this being the right prompt to talk about that. It's not really answering the question OP is asking.
- setgree 3y ago
- jhallenworld 3y agoFor technical discussion groups: USENET. Either moderated newsgroups or even unmoderated ones for obscure enough topics. Spam is the issue, but not much spam on USENET these days. Also, the ham radio guys like groups.io, which is where yahoo groups migrated to. There are a lot of groups there on specific things, like Yeasu FT-857D transceiver. Groups.io has per-group file storage, which is handy for this. Anyway on USENET, you can access it via google groups, but it's a bit non-obvious. Here is an example group: https://groups.google.com/g/sci.math https://groups.google.com/g/sci.math But how can you find groups? You click on "all groups and messages" on the top, then enter a search term and hit enter. Then click "outside my org". When I do this for the term "france" it shows "4635 groups outside your organization". Open the list and look for the groups that have "." separators, for example "alt.france". https://groups.google.com/g/alt.france https://groups.google.com/g/alt.france The ones without the dot separators are google groups- if you post, the message does not go outside of google. I don't know if you can create a USENET newsgroup through google groups- probably not. It's kind of crap for discovery, but OK once you have a set of groups you use often. Edit: actually a better way for discovery is a website like this: http://www.harley.com/usenet/master-list/index.html http://www.harley.com/usenet/master-list/index.html Once you have the name of the newsgroup, just append it to the groups.google.com/g/ (also the site provides a link).
- RobotToaster 3y agoWorth noting that google censor a bunch of usenet groups from google groups.
- metadaemon 3y agoWasn't aware of groups.io for ham discussions, thanks for posting! For USENET, I think I know the answer, but are there other consumption methods that you know of/recommend?
- jhallenworld 3y agoI was a USENET addict- long ago I had a shell account on "world.std.com" (The Software Tool & Die)- they were the first dial-up ISP, located in Brookline, MA. Anyway at some point they stopped- by which I mean they stopped billing me and people moved on to the web. But for at least a decade they left the machine running, and I could use it no charge. So anyway, on a shell ISP, you read and post news with the "trn" command- "trn" is a text-only newsreader client. For discovery- well USENET was in the filesystem. So "comp.arch" is located in /usr/spool/news/comp/arch. So you could just "find" and "grep" to discover new groups. Also there was a newsgroups file that had the full list- I forgot the name of this. For the web today? I know there are for-pay sites, don't know any free ones. Maybe others do. Google groups was kind of good enough if you only frequented a few groups. You can use https://www.eternal-september.org/ https://www.eternal-september.org/ with a newsreader client. See: https://www.maketecheasier.com/best-usenet-newsgroups/ https://www.maketecheasier.com/best-usenet-newsgroups/ I just tried it with claws-mail. Here is a quick start for Ubuntu (this feels like 1999): apt-get install claws-mail claws-mail it forces you to create a mailbox, don't worry about this (you can delete it later). Once you have the main screen: Configuration->Create Account Name of account: USENET Protocol NEWS (NNTP) News server: news.eternal-september.org Check This server requires authentication Fill in USER ID and Password you got from email after signing up with Eternal September and close. Now right click on mailbox USENET, select subscribe to newsgroup.
- kraftman 3y agoNot entirely related but a few years ago I started a side project with the aim of teaching myself a few new tools, and solving some of the biggest issues I had with reddit. [1] Since then, reddit has addressed a lot of these themselves (crossposting, submitting text and link together) but in quite a bolted-on way. I would love to see a site that rather than just being a reddit clone, takes all of the lessons learnt from reddit over the years as a base and better enables these communities and discussions. [1] https://github.com/kraftman/TenTags.io https://github.com/kraftman/TenTags.io
- JSavageOne 3y agoI totally agree on the general superiority of tags vs. subreddits, and did the same for my Reddit/HN alternative https://zsync.xyz https://zsync.xyz . I can see the case for private communities/forums, but I think tags make more sense for most use cases. My main complaint with Reddit since the early ~2010s has been the crap post/comment quality. In 2008/9 when I first joined, the comment quality was very high. Then memes, puns, one-liners, and hivemind took over and ruined the site. An ideal Reddit would be able to show you posts/comments that you're most likely to enjoy, such as via a "sort by" option tailored to you, or other sort by options like an "insightful" that actually works and doesn't just give you low effort one-liners that add nothing to your life. High quality content in general needs to be better incentivized, and right now it's not. Anyways I have a lot of ideas around that I wrote elsewhere so will refrain from dumping then all here [1] The challenge with developing a Reddit alternative however unfortunately is not technical, it's overcoming the chicken and egg problem where nobody cares about your site if no one else is on there. [1] https://jsavage.xyz/2022/03/13/the-downfall-of-reddit-why-reddit-sucks-and-how-to-fix-it/ https://jsavage.xyz/2022/03/13/the-downfall-of-reddit-why-re...
- kraftman 3y agoSomething I toyed with for comment quality was having a way to only show comments by people subscribed to the subreddit your viewing, to avoid brigading from other parts of the site, and sorting comments based on reactions, to be able to filter out 'funny' replies from insightful: https://github.com/kraftman/TenTags.io/blob/bc6f3046dda4815b80c45d2fd31c8643d0db35d8/api-cdn/lib/constants.lua#L13 https://github.com/kraftman/TenTags.io/blob/bc6f3046dda4815b...
- ozarker 3y agoI’d like to think that people might use this opportunity to move to distributed options like rss with forums operated independently or maybe federated alternatives but neither of those options are easy enough from an end-user standpoint to get traction against the next big link-aggregator site
- jzig 3y agoI'd like to see an alternative Vanguard-style (the investment group) owned by the people for the people. I wonder what that would look like? E.g. socialize the hosting costs and take votes on new policies.
- acover 3y agoHow do you enter a two sided market? I don't think enough people care about ownership structures to join your service or keep it growing.
- Giorgi 3y agoThis question pops every time there is crisis on reddit, reality is - there is none.
- EGreg 3y agoI'm going to be self-serving and mention https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/ https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/ Using the Qbix platform you can assemble your own reddit, and then invite people to it, in a matter of hours. It's free and open source, and runs on PHP. Any commodity host that runs Wordpress should be able to run it, but if you want you can use Node.js It also integrates with Discourse, if you want to have a robust forum software that is also actively developed by a sister team. PS: If you do play around and install it, you should apply to https://qbix.com/ecosystem https://qbix.com/ecosystem so you can be a host. Qbix is going to eventually join the fediverse but right now it's more about being a viable decentralized replacement for Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, etc.
- golgo_13 3y agoReddit is complete garbage, also influenced by GOV.... just as much as FB if not more. I stopped using when I got banned for politely asking the medical community about why my ears were (and still are) ringing from the J&J shot.
- boplicity 3y agoWhat do you want, exactly? I've been running a forum for 15 years. It's now horrible, outdated software, full of bugs and probably security holes. However, it works. It has an active community. It requires almost zero maintenance on my end. A cheap VPS will do the trick. Before Reddit, people would just type in "forum" when doing a Google search. That should still do the trick. For example a Google search for, how to tie a knot "forum" brings up many forum discussions.
- mewpmewp2 3y agoThere's many problems with forums though. Different UI/UX interface. Different requirements in order to be able to start using. You have to register a new account. A lot of friction before you are able to join and participate in a new community. Many forums will also require you to have certain amount of useful posts to avoid spam etc. With Reddit, or Reddit alternatives you don't have to worry about all that.
- mostlysimilar 3y agoPerhaps some friction is a good thing. Registering an account isn't exactly a huge burden, especially in the era where your browser will pre-fill and store the credentials for you forever. Maybe if it wasn't so easy to pop in and karma farm / spam / meme we would have some more thoughtful discourse online again.
- shagie 3y ago> A lot of friction before you are able to join and participate in a new community. Arguably, that is one of the things that keeps the quality of content higher. Likewise, it is too easy to post on Reddit allowing for the easy low content/quality material to make its way there more frequently. Quoting from A Group is its Own Worst Enemy - https://gwern.net/doc/technology/2005-shirky-agroupisitsownworstenemy.pdf https://gwern.net/doc/technology/2005-shirky-agroupisitsownw... ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35855988 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35855988 ) - from four things to design for: > Three, you need some barriers to participation, however small. This is one of the things that killed Usenet, because there was almost no barrier to posting, leading to both generic system failures like spam, and also specific failures, like constant misogynist attacks in any group related to feminism, or racist attacks in any group related to African- Americans. You have to have some cost to either join or participate, if not at the lowest level, then at higher levels. There needs to be some kind of segmentation of capabilities. > Now, the segmentation can be total—you’re in or you’re out, as with the music group I just listed. Or it can be partial—anyone can read Slashdot, anonymous cowards can post, non-anonymous cowards can post with a higher rating. But to moderate, you really have to have been around for a while. It has to be hard to do at least some things on the system for some users, or the core group will not have the tools that they need to defend themselves. > Now, this pulls against the cardinal programming virtue of ease of use, but ease of use is the wrong goal for social software. Ease of use is the wrong way to look at the situation, because you’ve got the Necker cube flipped in the wrong direction, toward the individual, when in fact, the user of a piece of social software is the group.
- bilsbie 3y agoIt’s not a one to one alternative but I’ve gradually moved from reddit to twitter to get my news and find interesting takes on whatever topics I’m interested in. I just follow a few interesting people for whatever topics I want to follow. In fact the “for you” page has been giving me decent recommendations lately.
- Sunspark 3y agoSince Musk took over, I've been getting recommended a lot more right-wing topics and people. Maybe they were always there and just getting suppressed by the previous management, but I suspect there is a finger on the scale to try and push discourse in that direction. I barely use twitter these days. The platform is falling apart. If you aren't a paying subscriber you will be deboosted, blue checkmarks are the ones that get raised to the top first. I also resent having to wade through a sea of bot garbage that aren't even real people. Just algos from Russia and other lovely places that are programmed to pop up and froth and foam if they see a keyword. Old twitter was fun though, back when it was real people.
- tezgon 3y agoIt's changed so much in such a short time since the acquisition. The quality of responses that are boosted to the top are so poor that I frequently wonder just how those people get through the day. Not to mention that I constantly get notifications to subscribe to people who I've never once interacted with before. I've heard of BlueSky, do you know if it's any similar to the Twitter of the late aughts/early 2010s?
- Sunspark 3y agoBlueSky is invite-only and it's something the previous Twitter founder is putting together. I am skeptical it will go anywhere, not just because of network effects asking everyone to switch to a new platform, but also because well, if he had all those years to fix Twitter and fiddled while Rome burned, why would his new venture be any better? Would it follow the same original path as Twitter? E.g. having an open api allowing app developers to make something for everyone, then remove it? It also isn't a charity venture even though he is quite rich now (owns Square, etc.) It is a corporation, so it will be set up to monetize in some way. I like to think that people are getting sick of being the product for some corporation. Pretty sure that a large # of those "people" you refer to are actually bots. If they're mostly noise and mostly tied to something political they're probably a bot. Take a look at a sampler. If they only seem to pop-up whenever Biden is mentioned or only ever talk about a single thing especially at odd times of the day..
- mcmoor 3y agoAre there any other good sites that also have cascading comments like reddit and this site? I've realized that it's the best format for reading discussion for me. Any flat structure just won't cut it.
- quadratecode 3y agohttps://sic.pm/ https://sic.pm/ is an interesting project by epilys I have saved but the code seems to have been removed from GitHub.
- KnobbleMcKnees 3y agokbon.social is the only one I've seen that looks and quacks like a reddit-esque duck, albeit a "store's own brand" version
- jjcm 3y agoI've written a bit about this before, but fundamentally Reddit has a misalignment between the needs of the user and the needs of the platform[1]. There's a great list of alternatives here, https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/yttdlc/list_of_active_reddit_alternatives_v8/ https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/yttdlc/... though if you are choosing one, I'd highly encourage you to find / try one that relies on a federated or a paid model. A free model will eventually end up in the same situation we're in today. [1] https://non.io/reddit-has-platform-user-misalignment https://non.io/reddit-has-platform-user-misalignment
- crmrc114 3y agoLemmy
- liotier 3y agoHN is a well honed functional equivalent to a subreddit... Could it become the centerpiece for a free software self-hosted self-standing subreddit ?
- gremlinsinc 3y agolobsters could, it's much better in some aspects as it's kinda like a self hosted subreddit and it's open source(rails). dev.to might be another good option, it's also open source.
- hiepph 3y agoHN is just for tech. Sometimes I want to discuss non-tech topics. Nowhere is better than Reddit IMO. Discord and chat apps have so many noises that I always feel overwhelmed to keep up with the flow of chatting.
- naet 3y agoI don't use reddit directly as a user, but last night I was googling a tech question that had a bunch of relevant results in Reddit threads... only to find that the relevant subreddit had been put into "private" mode in protest of API changes, leaving the content inaccessible. So even though I don't necessarily pull up Reddit just to read, it does provide a good archive of questions and answers or other useful explanations in search engine results and losing that old content would be tough.
- spondylosaurus 3y agoI had the same experience trying to search some medical-ish* questions last night. It would be a shame if adding "reddit" to searches stops being an effective method to find non-SEO human content. * Medical-ish as in trying to find out if people with the same condition as me have had good/bad experiences with a particular OTC supplement. Certainly not looking for treatment or diagnosis via Reddit (or any online avenue) :P
- armchairhacker 3y agoPractically every reddit post up to today is archived. In theory, someone could create a gigantic static site with the data. But in practice it would be very expensive especially if you want fast loading times.
- rebelidealist 3y agoYou might be interested to a look at hawker.social. It combines reddit with features of Patreon (subscriptions) and discord (sub channel). You can also use it as a substack style publication!
- seydor 3y agoother subreddits. however reddit's search is so bad that nobody is going to find them
- irrational 3y agoToday I realized how much of a habit I was in checking certain subreddits like r/boardgames and r/woodworking. Probably three times today I have gone to Reddit out of habit, only to remember that I no longer have access to my customary subreddits. I’m hoping this time of blackout will break me of the Reddit habit.
- samsquire 3y agoReddit is just one place I read content. The other is https://lobste.rs/ https://lobste.rs/ I am always looking for interesting technical content to read. I want to learn. I would like to read your technical blog! If you don't have a blog, then you could try what I do, I promise it's minimal effort and easy to maintain and host and it costs nothing financial (except time you use to write) Go to GitHub, create a repository and tick the checkbox for including README.md. Then go to README.md and click the Edit icion in the top right corner. Write into this README.md file whenever you blog, creating a markdown heading with the blog post's title. You could include a date if you want. Please do this! It's a low tech solution to content to read.
- dominick-cc 3y agoFor the last few years, I've mainly used reddit as a way of sifting through search engine results to a better answer more quickly: e.g. "what is the answer to x reddit". I've been sick of overly SEO-optimized websites that are full of fluff and ads and don't easily surface information. I'm curious, if people do move from reddit, what my new search term will be.
- digitalsushi 3y agoWhy do we keep using private residences to host these parties, when we could be having them out in the streets where no one can take ownership of them? Reinvent usenet with modern web technology. All posts replicate, with verifiable authenticity, and the website presentation remains up to the instance host on what it should look like. Run a node, host an API for 3 bucks a year so that mobile clients can pull data. Run a website, host it with free accounts and spam it. Let people decide how they want to pay - wallets or eyes - but just stop hoarding the damned conversations.
- holler 3y agohttps://sqwok.im https://sqwok.im - All posts fully public and google indexed. - Built-in realtime chat rooms instead of threaded comments on all posts, complete with presence, @mentions, markdown support (check faq)(mobile & desktop web supported currently). - Trending based on chat activity and time decay. - Search, notifications, follows, themes, other settings like block a user. - Focus on simplicity, accessibility, usability. Previous Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31160302 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31160302 I'd taken some time off the project over the past several months to focus on regular work/life but still planning to release new features and push the project forward, with an upgrade to chat/presence to be released imminently and long-form posts to follow. Have been blessed to see people from all over the globe use this silly site I built because I wanted to use it myself. If you find it interesting please let me know how we can improve it etc. Also if you think you could bring something to this project and have interest feel free to reach out by email.
- oehpr 3y agoLove this! Interesting direction with real potential.
- holler 3y agoThank you! Appreciate it.
- anadem 3y agoDoesn't work on the three different browsers I tried just now .. I see only grey bars arranged rather like conversational text posts would be.
- holler 3y agohey sorry about that, I just checked and apparently for unknown reasons codepipeline just pushed a commit to prod that wasn't supposed to go out! site broken atm sigh, please check back in ~hour or so and apologies! working on a big change and unsure how it went through. edit: apparently AWS us-east-1 is down which brought the site down! (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36315300 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36315300)
- codetrotter 3y agoReddit alternatives: Beehaw https://beehaw.org/ https://beehaw.org/ Kbin Social https://kbin.social/ https://kbin.social/
- hidden80 3y ago4chan? It doesn't touch the scale and breadth of Reddit and I was always a little uncomfortable the handful of times I visited. Maybe because of no-rules /b/ but there are definitely some wholesome boards out there.
- cryoz 3y agoAny specific boards you would recommend on 4chan? Are there any other image boards worth using with reasonable discussions?
- hidden80 3y agoIt's really up to your interests, but I'll say /news/ because that's what I used Reddit for mostly. Here's a handy list: https://wiki.bibanon.org/4chan_Boards https://wiki.bibanon.org/4chan_Boards
- lb4r 3y agoSomewhat related, but I'd love for Apolloapp to break free from the Reddit API and simply become its own thing. It's backed by, depending on how you measure things, probably almost 50% of the Reddit community as it is. With some VC backing, or simply just crowdfunding to start things off, and continuous support from the subreddits that have gone dark, it could very well become a thing.
- RandallBrown 3y agoI would be interested to hear how you measure Apollo usage to say it's backed by 50% of Reddit. I've never used it and don't know anyone that has. I read a stat yesterday that only about 5% of Reddit traffic comes from 3rd party apps (might be incorrect) so I'm curious what impact it has beyond just a client for reddit. (I'm vaguely aware of some moderation tools that Apollo has.)
- lb4r 3y agoI don't mean the usage of Apollo in particular, but my understanding from what I've read is that according to some metrics, almost 50% of Reddit have gone dark, partly in support of Apollo. It's already the unofficial alternative to Reddit, except also kind of being Reddit at the same time. Correction: I did a quick check, and around 40% went dark according to this source, so not quite the 'almost 50%' that I proclaimed: https://twitter.com/aakashg0/status/1668107416490192897 https://twitter.com/aakashg0/status/1668107416490192897
- RandallBrown 3y agoAh, that makes more sense. 40% going dark is actually way higher than I would have thought.
- lb4r 3y agoIt also depends on how you interpret it. 22% of submissions, 38% of comments, 48% of authors, 43% of karma went dark.
- 3y ago
- UpToTheSky 3y agoThere is a subreddit about Reddit alternatives: https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/ https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/
- D13Fd 3y agoWhat do you use Reddit for? The answer is going to be subject-matter dependent. For me, Discord has already replaced 95% of my Reddit use -- and not because I'm anti-Reddit, but just because community activity has migrated to Discord naturally. The remainder of my Reddit use is mostly "a search engine sent me there."
- rkangel 3y agoYeah, but that last bit is so valuable. How often have I answered a technical question by adding "Reddit" to the search query. Having discussion indexable raises the value of any community.
- D13Fd 3y agoCompletely agreed - that's definitely where Discord falls down.
- lmedinas 3y agoI really have a problem with Discord how to choose a discussion, find a link and stay on topic. I see Discord as a modern IRC tbh but far from Reddit. Perhaps im using Discord in the wrong way. May i ask which type of communities do you follow in Discord ?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- TheCaptain4815 3y agoHow about we take this opportunity to go back to the old internet to a time where real free speech ruled. Remember how reddit started off, where ANYTHING went no matter what (as long as it was legal)? Do people have the courage for that anymore? I certainly do, and I'd love to hear from those who disagree in complete free speech for the next Reddit.
- russdill 3y agoIt's important, but so is community building. Most communities function best when there's some degree of moderation. For example, people would prefer that the speech in their bird watching community is limited and trolls are kept out. Putting up with abrasive behavior in your community isn't brave, it's just masochistic. It is true that some communities on Reddit weren't possible because they were not permitted to allow some of the content they were allowing.
- TheCaptain4815 3y agoYou can make the community building tools so much more powerful too! If people want to make a bird community and ban all pro-hawk posters, that's perfectly fine. The issue's are around the secrecy in administration. How about adding the following: - Removing shadowbans - Allow users to see all deleted comments if they opt in - Allow users to see all banned accounts/reasons they got banned. Imagine a page for each subreddit which includes a list of banned/removed comments. It would be quite telling on the moderation if that list was mostly non-spam disagreements. How about including an internet "Bill of Rights" for free speech, illogical arguments, etc to try and help guide the flow of discussion, similar to how /pol/ has this in their rules - https://i.4cdn.org/pol/1493993226750.jpg https://i.4cdn.org/pol/1493993226750.jpg
- russdill 3y agoSo you'd like to make communities more free by regulating them more?
- 3y ago
- steviedotboston 3y agoWhenever a site does something "bad" (Twitter and musk's BS, Reddit with their API nonsense, etc) people's initial reaction is to look for a site JUST like it but without the bad thing. That feels like stage 1 of grief: denial. Denial that the thing you loved is no longer the same. Maybe it's dead, or maybe its changed in such a drastic way thats its no longer the same thing. Regardless, I have never seen a successful website or service start from the premise of "we will be just like thing X, but without the bad thing". You need more than that. You need a vision. And I'd argue your initial motivation needs to be something positive, not negative. If you're initial motivation is "this website is doing something bad, so we need to make a similar site that doesn't do that" then you are motivated by a negative emotion, which will only drive you so far. You'll be driven by anger which might get a bunch of new users, but that emotion will fade, and after a while what will you have left? That isn't to say that situations like this aren't a great opportunity. Far from it. It's just that the opportunity requires people to think creatively. For sure learn from the mistakes of these companies, but also don't just create a clone that positions itself as a direct competitor or a home for refugees. That's just depressing and a recipe for failure.
- jxcole 3y agoI disagree completely. Facebook was just Myspace without the terrible UX. Google was just Yahoo but better. Tech businesses can easily move in over each other if there is a way to make it noticeably better.
- steviedotboston 3y agoFacebook did not start as a competitor to MySpace. It started as a niche social network for universities, and then eventually branched off to be a competitor to myspace. By the time it did, it had already positioned itself as a unique product. That's quite different than say, people upset with Reddit over the Apollo situation looking for a Reddit clone with a better API policy, or people who like Blue Sky because it's "Twitter without Elon Musk".
- comex 3y ago> Regardless, I have never seen a successful website or service start from the premise of "we will be just like thing X, but without the bad thing". Reddit itself received a massive influx of users from Digg after the unpopular Digg v4 change. For me and many others, it was just like Digg but without the bad thing. Admittedly that’s not how Reddit started - in fact, Reddit had been around for 5 years already at that point - but you could say the same thing about Mastodon, which was started in 2016(!), or Lemmy, which was started in 2019.
- thal3s 3y agoIf we go to yet another corporate/tech bros entity, we're stupid. Let's build our communities right this time and select something open-source, and federated so we don't end up in the same place in another 10 years.
- brightball 3y ago90% of the time there's a forum for the subject that's a better option anyway. For example, the College Football /r/cfb area is periodically entertaining but the Rivals.com network is significantly better for the same thing anyway. I found that blocking Reddit as part of the parental controls on my home network was beneficial anyway, considering just how much stuff falls under the umbrella of availability on that site. As a news aggregator it always felt untrustworthy and slanted anyway. There's nothing I miss about having it blocked.
- tezgon 3y agoAnd really beyond rivals.com, your team-specific forum is even better. I was a frequent poster on shaggybevo before it became surlyhorns, and still hang around there. Though there are some absolutely unhinged posters on them (you get that with most smaller forums I've found).
- brightball 3y agoThe paid forums on Rivals tend to be much better conversation. You still get a few but the barrier to entry filters a lot of crazy.
- agumonkey 3y agoto think ? walking and laying outside with a book
- drak0n1c 3y agoInterestingly, one of the largest started as https://patriots.win/ https://patriots.win/ which was created in the wake of the notorious the_donald subreddit's quarantine and ban. Top posts still get 50-200 comments and 1000+ upvotes, and it seems to have fairly high volume with hundreds of new posts per day. They branched out to become a general reddit-like alternative with other supposedly neutral and separately moderated subs, but the other ones have far lower activity levels - see their version of /all: https://communities.win/ https://communities.win/
- nscalf 3y agoThere may be alternatives to specific subreddits, but there is no Reddit alternative. There is only one macro network like Reddit, and that is Reddit. Maybe that network effect breaks, but I doubt that happens because of this.
- dvh 3y agoThe killer feature of Reddit (or any other silo) is that you don't have to maintain it. Even when your interest change and hobby x no longer interests you, the content you put there stays there. I've seen so many small community websites come and go, fall into disarray, succumb to spam and eventually close down. Maintaining pages long term is hard.
- shusaku 3y agoThere’s always ChatGPT. Have it generate a perfect community for you!
- electricant 3y agoI suggest you take a look at raddle: https://raddle.me/ https://raddle.me/
- andai 3y agoThe site:reddit.com search modifier is very useful. You are just missing the minus ;)
- shanecleveland 3y agoMany niche topics I have an interest in are still better represented by standalone forums, I have found.
- Camisa 3y agoSubreddits related to development and programming tried to create programming.dev, which is a federated alternative, but the registering is failing for some reason, possibly because of too many accounts being generated. Anyways aside from that it has good content.
- spacemule 3y agoFor tech issues, I recommend stackexchange and the various gpt-based products that repackage it. Phind.com is pretty good, but they're move back to gpt 3.5 has really neutered the quality of answers. For general discussion, there is no alternative, and reddit was not an option even before today. I was active on two non-tech subreddits: /r/judaism and /r/buttcoin. I am a classical liberal politically, but I am also an Orthodox Jew. I was banned across several accounts for respectfully stating Jewish beliefs in /r/Judaism and for saying that hating Jews isn't acceptable "anti-zionism" in /r/buttcoin. (I'm an anti-zionist, and my statement that hating Jews isn't ok led to a ban from the subreddit for "defending Zionist agression" or something equally absurd.) I've seen media become more polarized in the last ten years or so. There is little left and right discussion. There are places where left is OK and anything else is fascism, which is ok to ban. On the other side, there are conspiracy theories, and anything else is lies by communist pedophiles and groomers to discredit great patriots. (I guess I'm a fascist and a communist because I believe Trump is a criminal and men can't get pregnant.) HN stays pretty clean by avoiding politics, but if you're looking for good political discussion, please make your own site. I'll help with the infrastructure, and maybe some good discussion will come of it.
- rushingcreek 3y agoWe’ve added GPT-4 back to Phind. Disclosure: I’m the CEO
- kkfx 3y agoUsenet. Almost abandoned, full of spam, but still there: a decentralized network where anyone can run their own server, serving just to them or to someone or too anyone the groups they want. Groups are far more discoverable than Reddit subs and they work pretty well. Bonus: messages can be stored and then indexed locally as anyone might wish. In general: using a platform owned by someone else meant no real guarantee, being part of a communitarian platform, owning the bit we are interested in, means we are Citizens peers, between peers. If Reddit concern you try to imaging a fleet of leased connected cars, your webmail (with someone else domain name and no messages on your iron), even the "modern smart city" where anything is a service. When you'll see https://www.forbes.com/sites/worldeconomicforum/2016/11/10/shopping-i-cant-really-remember-what-that-is-or-how-differently-well-live-in-2030/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/worldeconomicforum/2016/11/10/s... you'll understand why we are there in IT terms and where is the future. IT state of thing is just few years in the future respect of the rest of the society.
- mminer237 3y agoI set up my own Lemmy server for now. (https://civilloquy.com/ https://civilloquy.com/) I'm not sure I see a ton of the benefits to federation, but it kind of lets a lot of services which would otherwise compete get a more substantial user base off the get-go. There still are no services with a user base to provide a comparable experience to reddit, but it has to start somewhere.
- vesinisa 3y agoMods: this valuable discussion has dropped from the main page without being a flamewar
- euclaise 3y agoHere, lobste.rs, mailing lists, and 4chan The other alternatives don't seem very viable
- m-p-3 3y agoRight now there is a vacuum, and who knows how that void will be filled, especially for niche and local communities. At the moment, I'm shuffling my time in between these * Tildes (tildes.net) * Lemmy (join-lemmy.org) * kbin (kbin.pub) Another place I like for community stuff is Discord. Yeah it's an instant-messaging platform and its target demographic is mostly gamers, but you can likely find one related to your city, and they added a "forum" option where you can easily participate. But it's proprietary, so you never know when they'll pull the rug like Reddit did.
- stiltzkin 3y agoThere is no a one for all alternative to Reddit. There are few promising tech as Lemmy or Kbin because they work with ActivityPub as Mastodon. What I have seen many don't like the free speech nature of ActivityPub and run away if they see a tech with an instance not of their liking. But Reddit tipping point started because most of 3rd party clients are closing as Apollo, none of current alternatives have a good client as Reddit clients. There are few centralized alternatives you can look up as Tildes, Lobsters and stacker news (focused on Bitcoin and Nostr).
- nzealand 3y agoTildes is invite only right now. You can monitor the invite thread on reddit here https://www.reddit.com/r/tildes/ https://www.reddit.com/r/tildes/ Alternatively you can contact the administrator of tildes here: https://docs.tildes.net/contact https://docs.tildes.net/contact
- leethomas 3y agoI've been using Lemmy and I've been pretty satisfied with it.
- JSavageOne 3y agoI have not found any serious alternatives. The main problem is the chicken and egg problem where no one cares unless other people are using it. I created my own alternative as a side project (https://zsync.xyz https://zsync.xyz) with some differences (eg. tags instead of subreddits), but there are no users - and why should there be? I used to use Reddit pretty heavily, but I stopped when I realized outside a few small use cases it wasn't benefitting my life and was mostly a time sink. I find that HN and Twitter is enough for my "social media" needs. I do hope we see a better alternative to Reddit though, one focused on fostering high quality. Reddit was like that in 2008-9 when I joined, but in just a few years devolved into the meme dumpster and PC hivemind. The Reddit founders and their investors (cough YC *cough) should be embarrassed. It's like raising a child prodigy with the potential to cure cancer only for that kid to grow up into some grifting alcoholic bum who just smokes weed all day and survives off of fake disability benefits.
- rondini 3y agoReddit has a much bigger problem with allowing hateful and dangerous content than being too "PC".
- JSavageOne 3y agoDo you have any examples? For example during COVID, Reddit was extremely toxic and hostile to any questioning of COVID lockdown policies. You couldn't even talk about travel in travel forums without being shamed as some kind of murderer and downvote censored to oblivion, let alone questioning the justification of lockdowns, border restrictions, and vaccine mandates. Reddit has had an extreme woke left bias for a long time such as in its main subs like /r/politics. Of course this extremity on one side breeds counter extremes on the other like /r/TheDonald. The hivemind nature of the site ultimately makes everyone more divided and worse off. I wrote a bit about the toxicity of Reddit here https://jsavage.xyz/2022/03/13/the-downfall-of-reddit-why-reddit-sucks-and-how-to-fix-it/ https://jsavage.xyz/2022/03/13/the-downfall-of-reddit-why-re...
- pengo 3y agoI set up a Lemmy account yesterday. It has promise.
- tmaly 3y agoCome back to MySpace, we will welcome you with open arms. But I can't let you edit the raw html anymore. The blink tags were too much.
- triplepoint217 3y agoWe don't have a community yet, but sift (https://sift.quest/ https://sift.quest/) is aiming to be a comprehensive alternative. We've got some new ideas around dealing with cross posts: * posts can have multiple tags and be findable from any of them * all posts to the same url map to the same backend node (so you don't get as many duplicates) I'm actually most excited about what we're trying to do with regards to the low effort content and degradation of communities aspects. At our core we're actually a reputation/trust/"how much do I want to see things from this person" graph that has recently pivoted to being a Reddit alternative. This means that (once we get the community going and our algorithms tuned up), we should be able to offer you much more ergonomic ability to choose how much of what kind of content you want to see (people who like memes can post them, but you can choose not to see them. We're still in alpha and don't have much of a community yet, but we're adding features fast and will be very friendly and responsive to any feature requests you have.
- lee101 3y ago[dead]
- friend_and_foe 3y agoComprehensive? The internet would be my first choice. The fact is, all community organization online being on one site is an awful idea as we see with this and other things that have happened in the past. Communities should host their own forums. Searchability... The truth is that Google isn't a search engine, it's a content aggregator now. It doesn't even index the internet! And it blocks valid results, for reasons ranging from "its a pirate site" to "we don't want you knowing these things". This site:reddit.com thing is a workaround, because sites like reddit have taken over enthusiast run information depos on the internet. Looking at it now, it's a bad idea to have all that information in one place, no?
- Summershard 3y agoThere was a P2P Reddit alternative some time ago. The problem with it was that you had to install a program on your computer, so it can sync with the network. I doubt it still exists, but the idea was intriguing. Anyone remember the name?
- assfart 3y agojust bunch try hard dickfarts intent on ruining things for everyone.
- djfrodo 3y agoheadcycle.com - there are dozens of us, dozens!