Subreply – An open source text-only social network (opens in new tab)

I've seen so many forums where the pitch is that it's "like a subreddit or Hacker News but for X", where X is scientific papers, Go articles, OtherLang articles, etc.. and the only one that maintained at least some traffic is lobste.rs, all the others are ghost towns.

I love the UI.

Yeah, this reminds me of old Reddit where people resorted to imgur and other image hosts before they introduced their own photo upload feature.

I've never used Mastodon of Bluesky and I hate Twitter. I do feel pretty engaged with HN, and it is text-only. I'm not sure what makes "social media" different from a discussion board though, so I don't know whether HN counts. I do remember that github used to call itself social coding, which was one factor making me want to stay away from it.

But there are no images here

It's worth pointing out that the post in question was made in the past half hour amidst the wave of activity from HN. Not to say your point isn't valid, but I think this is more an example of trolls who will say anything and everything to cause anger and insult; it's not representative of those who believe in free speech, or the site itself for that matter.

For some people if you can say the most extreme things, then you can say anything else, including things that are nowhere near as bad as this but are banned in other platforms.

I have admined what I consider free speech friendly communities in the past (think forums), people always join and ruin it for everyone else.

It is a bad look, but it makes sense to me.

For what it's worth, right now at least, most thoughts and opinions people have in the English speaking world can be expressed just fine without it getting moderated out, despite what some would claim. And so those who seek out platforms where they won't get moderated will primarily be folks who would get otherwise moderated out elsewhere. One can also refer to cryptocurrencies and Tor for a parallel.

> I am, in fact, pro free speech.

You can be pro free speech and still not condone hate speech, or libel, or doxxing, or a myriad of other problems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech

Free speech doesn’t mean you can say literally anything in literally any context. Not, not even in the “land of the free”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_in_the_Unite...

Additionally, XKCD reminds:

https://xkcd.com/1357/

> A problem with a subset of people who like free speech or something? I don't get it.

I don’t think those people particularly care about free speech, they just want to be able to say whatever they want with no repercussions. The more of a “free speech absolutist” they claim to be, usually the worse they are. It’s a common pattern to see those same individuals clamour for free speech in one post and then in another call for banning books or try to silence someone else.

We see much worse than that all the time. We go to movies that portray horror, torture, murder, depravity, slavery, etc. There are books that contain all those. There are tattoos on people that depict scenes of death and satanism. We put these in their proper place and tolerate them, many people even enjoy them. There are some efforts to keep them out of the public eye and away from children, but it's quite easy to see incidental advertisements, posters, or discussions of all of them.

We should treat social media the same way. There should be a way to filter what you don't want to see, that's your choice. But we shouldn't try to stamp out people saying what they want, or decide what other people should filter for themselves.

Most people who say things like you quoted, aren't killers, i'd guess that most of them aren't even racist. A good fraction of them are just immature, or social outcasts, that are desperate to get a rise out of people. If we could all turn down our reactivity, there'd be less of a draw, for those troublemakers to spew their nonsense.

What we should be the most on guard against, are the unintended consequences of trying to censor this stuff. People shouldn't have their political and social voices limited, just because a relatively few people are disruptive like this.

When your speech has no apparent consequences people tend to say the most obscene things because in their mind it’s been taboo for so long. The problem is that is an extreme dopamine rush and if not checked, can cause you to seek that reward by opening your mouth a second time. (Or typing your thoughts on social media).

And yet, it is still not open source :)

You make it sound like they claim subreply is the thing that might have killed mastodon. The full post is:

Mastodon is dead. Most people have migrated to Bluesky or Threads.

Most of their other posts on the front page also aren’t exactly charismatic (or plain childish). A good early warning sign to stay away from that place!

Can you give some pointers to some popular implementations or algorithms in any language, please?

Is there some "industry standard" or "best practice" for such a metric?

I guess Bitwarden might have something publicly available...

UTF-8 is still text :p

I’ve become increasingly convinced that the two main negative metrics for social media are spam and spite. But people only tend to focus on the spam and only act on spite when it tips into abuse. If we put the same amount of effort into spite as we did spam, the difference would be immense and social media would be far healthier.