A few quick things:
1. I don't believe federated platforms will ever become mainstream. They have a whole host of problems, not the least of which is that they're too complicated for most people to use. This platform is not, therefore, federated.
2. I don't know what the best way of monetizing a thing like this is. I see only two options: the Wikipedia model of running on donations, or being advertising supported (along with a paid ad-free tier). The Wikipedia model works quite well for small-scale and bandwidth light projects, but I don't think a large social media platform can ever be funded that way.
3. Whichever option of monetization I take (if this takes off, that is) what I can say with certainty is that this will not go down the path of previous platforms. I don't believe the SV grow-fast model has worked very well for the end users. I have no interest in chasing growth for its own sake, or in chasing valuations, or in capturing as much attention from the users as possible. On this platform, therefore, there never will be any dark UI patterns. Avoiding enshittification is a primary goal of mine.
4. My vision for this platform, and for social media in general, is about giving users agency; the freedom to choose their social experience to their liking. What this would mean in practice are things like: ability to customize the UI; ability to filter content as one wants; ability to tweak recommendation algorithms; ability to turn on and off things like infinite scroll and suggested posts; and so on. I hate how all the current platforms want to tightly control my experience for me.
I go into all this in a bit more detail in my introductory blog post: https://discuit.substack.com/p/introducing-discuit
I know many HN users hate the New Reddit layout, which is what I've based this site on, but don't be bothered by it too much, I will be adding a much more compact layout sometime later.
One of the big issues I see with Reddit right now, is that we the community never "owned" the data. Now that the site owner's motives changed, we're stuck in this weird state where the community made the site what it is today, and now the owner is taking it back to monetize it for his own gain. If the community is required to help moderate, grow, and maintain an organized dataset, it would be ideal if somehow the community shares ownership or has assurances it remains faithful to the statements above we are buying into.
Looking at this from your perspective, you have a really good point here. And I don't know exactly what to say to you except that, at the end of the day, with anything with network effects, you have to trust someone. This even applies to the fediverse; you have to trust the admins.
Perhaps the most that someone can do here is to proclaim their values loudly, so that they are, at the very least, putting their reputation on the line.
If you have any ideas what I could do here, I'd love to hear. Seriously.
The only reason people switch from old communities to new ones is because of a vastly better UI for your average user. See the switch from Usenet to forums to Stack Overflow / Facebook or w/e. In the case of Digg to reddit, Digg’s UI got worse.
The only thing anyone can do is make a new app/website with vastly better UI and then live through your values accordingly.
Most of your blog post is about moderation/monetization and that’s important, but to be honest, it doesn’t speak directly to your average user.
What would be good is a modern enough Reddit clone, open source, that you can selfhost once per subreddit and one or more places that will host that (like you can get wordpress hosting from 1000 places). Maybe have some free ones that run ads but still run the same basic software and do it free.
What you will have is some localised issues but no one has the power to change everything and pull the rug on millions.
I don't trust anyone running my Matrix, Kbin, Mastodon, or email servers. Well, they're me, and I guess I trust me. (My family trusts me too, I suppose)
How can this work practically or legally ? Any real world concrete ideas ? I am open to learning more.
You know what's an interesting problem? Decentralizing moderation. HN does it sort of but the masses are really stupid and biased.
Maybe an ML based personal moderator. Based off of comments you vote down or up.
The problem isn't Sensible vision.
The problem is getting enough users to make your community interesting.
I won't say that a clean ui is not part of the problem. Just in this very thread there's people despising Reddit's redesign. The HN hivemind and others like UIs with information crammed on every pixel (for some reason) so I guess if there were an alternative that offered some "information density" setting, that very thing can do much to attract users.
About how to get said users. The 4 years I've been using Reddit and have seen the popular page, you're left with the sensation that much of it is just a giant aggregator of curated content from TikTok/Twitter/Instagram, in that order (and how almost everything is centered about the USA, but that's another story). I think people would engage to that new platform if there were a way to improve that process of bringing new and trending stuff from those other platforms (and Reddit itself) to a new alternative.
Additionally if the moderators i am subscribed to aren't moderating enough of what i would like to avoid seeing, i'd like to be able to subscribe to more moderators to cover any gaps, without affecting the website for other people who might want to see the content i want to avoid.
These would ensure that i can actually control my personal experience and have unparalleled agency on your website, without infringing on anyone else's experience.
Right now the site is very basic. But this is an interesting idea to explore, for sure.
I'm also thinking of similar ideas. Examples: moderator logs for transparency; ability for members to vote moderators out, etc.
What is porn?
> No politics.
What is political?
> No racism or any form of bigotry.
What is bigoted?
> A soft rule of: Don't be an asshole.
What is an asshole?
I understand that one cannot draw a line to clearly separate categories from categories, but that doesn't mean that categories don't exist.
As to the definition of these terms, I was only thinking of their "common sense" meaning.
What is the common sense meaning of bigotry?
There’s plenty of political discussion on this site (the top 5 includes about ongoing EU legislation). There’s obviously some pretty heavy-handed moderation of it (not that it is inappropriate for this particular community), but no general forum will get very far with such a rule.
Reddit is a general forum. There are subreddits that are moderated heavily and need to be, and those that are barely moderated. There are subreddits for porn and politics because people want those. Reddit replacement needs to support multiple communities and varying moderation.
Grey lines are hard (impossible?) to enforce.
Porn = Nude Pictures/audio/videos of human beings. People having sex of any type in the form of video/audio/images.
Politics = Discussion of any political ideology. Libeal/Conservative/Country etc etc. I personally disagree with OP here but wanted to define it for you anyway.
Bigoted = judging/not liking people purely based on where they come from, color of their skin, sexual orientation or religion.
Asshole = someone who engages in bad faith with someone and/or calls them names. disagreeing != asshole. But if you add name calling, verbal abuse, direct threats to someone, I would call them as asshole.
I've now just dropped the "no politics" rule, because people seem to get the wrong idea.
I know you said you don't believe in federation, but why not solve the problems with federation.. or if you think that's entirely the wrong approach, then figure out some other way of solving the issues that federation attempts to address. Those issues don't disappear just because it's your project.
That's the example Wikimedia has set.
No thanks!
As a practical matter, is sex ed material adult content? Would discussion of LGBT rights (or people), or election results, or the site guidelines, or the Reddit protests be political?
I never adopted new reddit and when I see it, I know I've been signed out. Old reddit is the only "clean" UI in my book.
Same with this website.
I applaud the dev work, but this isn't going attract the tech crowd.
I could see a "polished" Fediverse app that abstracted away the server concept-- you'd say "I want to read the $subject Lemmy community / $person Mastodon account" and it would aggregate and deduplicate data on multiple servers automagically for a rich feed. Maybe track the emergence or discontinuation of servers and refine the lists.
Then, if you want to be particularly precise about which providers you're working with, you can go in and micro-manage the automatic selections.
2. Name me something that has outlived reddit and not gone through enshitification (it's a term, I'm not being crass). Name one single product or platform.
2. I mean, Wikipedia, but it's not the point. Yes, us tech people are maybe concerned about things being shit, lock-in, etc - but literally no-one else cares. So our best approach isn't to make something perfect from the tech point of view, but perfect enough that there is mass migration to it - because, as we all know, it ain't about the tech, it's about the momentum, content and growth. And in order to get these into a serious shape, we need migration. And to get migration we need slick, beautiful, easy to use UIs.
Points 1 & 2, together, are basically a dead-on-arrival style announcement. Would be fitting if it were intentionally ironic.
The lede is buried anyway, no politics/porn/etc. Again, see #1. We have no reason to trust, the folks that say "no politics" are always political in favor of the status quo and don't understand the full implications of social networks. At all
Edit: does OP's 8 month old comment talking about wealth redistribution from tech billionaires being tantamount to "Soviet Russia" count as political? Etc etc etc.
I wouldn't call Wikipedia a "small-scale and bandwidth light project".
It may still be a bit away from a tipping point and the UX may not be 100% finished, but to me Lemmy looks like the clear favorite for a platform one can use today. If you're compatible with it you automatically get its content, which is a valuable commodity for kick-starting right now.
Growing a community is going to be a huge challenge.
I'm working on something similar, but based on Nostr.
Good luck man.
You basically used/aped Facebook's feed layout (which is super outdated and not optimal for this) while replicating Reddit without solving any of Reddit's inherent problems.
These problems will go away. There is no usability problem or bug in the fediverse software that is inherit to its federated nature.
On the other hand, your centralized software will always be centralized. To me this is already a "bug" that can not be fixed.
I suspect you're a little too early in the process to have to consider that, but it's worth thinking about if things start going well.
When you embark on the more compact website, do you intend to support static HTML?
Not against capitalism but for some things - especially free as in beer for everyone things — it doesn’t work well for users.
Sorry, no it's not.
