Ask HN: Reddit alternatives (that aren't Mastodon)

29 points by TylerE 3 years ago

With the upcoming APIocalypse, where are reddit refugees to go?

Hard Requirements:

NOT Mastodon. That's simply a different paradigm. NOT tech only. Wide spectrum discussion. NOT an alt-right hive.

Soft Requirements:

A decent mobile interface, preferably a non-crappy iOS app. Not overtly commercial/meme/crypto oriented

schwartzworld 3 years ago

Lemmy is to Reddit what Mastadon is to Twitter

tester457 3 years ago

> NOT an alt-right hive.

Lemmy is the only alternative I have seen so far that has learned from the failures of Voat.

But the userbase is tiny, and smaller than even niche subreddits.

  • ranger_danger 3 years ago

    Lemmy is openly politically hostile: https://0x0.st/HbDc.jpg

    Also there are some people who detest it based on the fact that it is written in Rust.

    • Daeraxa 3 years ago

      Oh no! Anyway...

    • tomstockmail 3 years ago

      They removed that filter a long time ago, so "never" didn't quite stick. You took a screenshot of an issue from 2020.

    • krapp 3 years ago

      [flagged]

      • Mezzie 3 years ago

        Oh no, not degeneracy.

        But seriously, that's a giant slippery slope and anyone claiming to be on the left should see that. (Unless you're an authoritarian leftist who's for economic centralization but socially conservative).

        Speaking as somebody who remembers when my existence was considered 'degenerate', I'm wary of any attempts to put degeneracy on the same level as hate speech.

      • hayst4ck 3 years ago

        Neutrality means supporting whoever has more power to dominate.

        Neutrality means support for injustice because the cost of enforcing justice is too high.

        • xigoi 3 years ago

          There's a lot of conflicts in the world. I bet you're neutral on many of them (because you don't even know them). Does that mean you actively support the winning side?

          • hayst4ck 3 years ago

            I think that is weirdly pedantic and an abuse of the word neutrality.

            Would it help if I said "taking a position of neutrality implicitly supports the more powerful and therefore neutrality supports oppression?"

    • hayst4ck 3 years ago

      Liberalism is an ideology that contradictions are wrong. Conservatism is an ideology that authority is right. These are core axioms that define belief systems.

      This manifests itself as liberal spectrum people having to adjust their beliefs with new information, while conservative spectrum people mold new information by their currently existing beliefs. That's pretty black and white, and the truth is much more grey, but if you take this as a model for political conversation, I don't think you'll be disappointed very often.

      Someone who thinks their priest is the ultimate arbiter of truth will never be able to come to terms with someone who sees contradictions as the ultimate arbiter of truth.

      So it's not that it's politically hostile so much as an enforcement of a core axiom of how truth is arrived at and how disputes are resolved -- in particular that contradictions are wrong. "We aren't going to tolerate conservatism where truth comes from priests and godkings or some ecclesiastic structure" seems fine, if not appealing to me.

      Liberalism is a walled garden ideology, and conservatives frequently want to enjoy the garden, despite littering the garden with their efforts to dominate rather than reach consensus.

      So "politically hostile" while it sounds like a negative isn't. I mean I am politically hostile towards nazis, rashists, and tankies and don't really want to share a forum with them. American conservatives and "y'all qaeda" in particular are rapidly approaching these ultimately fascist and authoritarian political movements.

      • xigoi 3 years ago

        Yeah, liberals never stick to dogmatic beliefs. That's why they all insisted that Johnny Depp was the abuser because he's a man.

    • wwfredrogersdo 3 years ago

      If you think having slurs filtered is “politically hostile” you and I have a different idea of what political discourse is.

jstx1 3 years ago

We don't have one right now, reddit is still a unique place (in good and bad ways).

ausbitbank 3 years ago

I've been using hive for 5 years now. Solid tech, good people, actually decentralized. Communities (like subreddits) for niche interests. Dozens of front-ends with different focus and style. I've only used the android mobile client but it's pretty slick.

https://ecency.com/ https://hive.io

  • mkbkn 3 years ago

    It looks good. Will sign up and try.

    Thanks for sharing :)

    Update: The site won't allow me to sign up with Simplelogin aliases or Firefox Relay. It asks for a "real" email address which I personally won't provide. Also, clicking the premium option asks you to download their app. No thanks.

esxhan 3 years ago

Hey there, we've spent the past one year building an app that's essentially a reddit alternative with better cross language support. We're currently in beta and looking for more users. Please check it out on https://spyke.social

  • hayst4ck 3 years ago

    I have been using social media for as long as the internet was generally accessible. This is feedback from that perspective, and I hope it is seen as feedback despite the terse critical tone.

      - That landing page is obnoxious. Show me content, not marketing.
  - I have 0 interest in installing an app.
  - If I installed an app, I would only use it to consume content, not write content.
  - It is incredibly hard to write well thought or researched content without a web browser/keyboard.
  - The colored thread lines are extremely distracting and obnoxious.
  - The default "hinglish" instead of my own language "en-US" is confusing for a 
    platform that promises to be language agnostic.
  - The choice to write text that tells me to click the button, and not creating an 
    interface where button clicking is natural is UI that could be improved.
  - Show that language is seamless, not that I can switch between them.
  - "Klan" is synonymous with Ku Klux Klan to Americans, an extremely racist American 
    organization. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ku_Klux_Klan
  - Putting "Klan" an organization that hates brown people of any type next to 
    "brown people twitter" is confusing from an American cultural perspective.

    > don't let AI control what you see, get an unbiased look at content that everyone is voting on.

    Everyone claims no bias. If someone says unbiased, I do not trust them. I would prefer someone to show me they are self aware of their own bias and know what those bias are.

    If I watched news that told me only things I agree with, I would consider that unbiased news. In China, "Taiwan is part of China" is a statement Chinese would consider to have no bias. "unbias" has no practical meaning.

    Even if AI isn't optimizing for "engagement"/addiction, there are still bots impersonating users which use AI to influence conversations.

brodouevencode 3 years ago

...assuming another reddit model is desired. Reddit turned into a cesspool long before it's API changes.

  • hayst4ck 3 years ago

    Computing history is one that swings between centralization and decentralization.

    Before reddit there were decentralized forums. Reddit took the idea of forums and centralized it so multiple forums are now hosted on one site.

    Desire for threaded discussion still exists, and I think centralization has more network effect benefits than drawbacks.

    I think there is definitely a market for threaded discussion with more heavy handed moderation against poorly educated/bad faith people.

369548684892826 3 years ago

https://tildes.net/

  • dieselgate 3 years ago

    Not familiar with it prior to your comment. A bit refreshing the post about Apple conference has less comments than multiple other items on the front page

  • Semaphor 3 years ago

    I liked the userbase, I did not like the (back then) single overlord/admin.