19 ms·

There already is a decentralized Reddit where subreddits are called websites and anyone can start one and run it as they please. What Reddit and similar sites

There already is a decentralized Reddit where subreddits are called websites and anyone can start one and run it as they please. What Reddit and similar sites bring to the table is a single pool of authenticated users. Once a user is logged into Reddit, posting on different subreddits is frictionless. Even with oauth and the like, it is hard to replicate that with a distributed set of sites.

hutzlibu 7y ago
"There already is a decentralized Reddit where subreddits are called websites and anyone can start one and run it as they please" But can your grandmother do this ... or just the common person?
- jacquesm 7y ago
  Once upon a time, yes.
  - cjsawyer 7y ago
    It’s easier now than ever. The difference is that normal people don’t venture off the big websites now.
    - hutzlibu 7y ago
      It is easy to set up a site, to blog and people can comment and you do not get drowned in auto spam? Where and how?
      - flavor8 7y ago
        ...and enough people find your content to have a decent conversation without you having to learn marketing?
        eitland 7y ago
        Try. My blog got 16 visitors from another blog today. (edit: it is now 23!) Won't make me rich. But it makes me happy that I am part of rebuilding an old style web. If you write about interesting stuff, post your website below and I might add a link and I don't care about nofollow and all that SEO stuff. Maybe 5 of my visitors visit you. You won't get rich but you will be part of something.
        flavor8 7y ago
        I did, for 7 or 8 years. It was good for my writing skills (and fun) but it was a little like talking into a vacuum.
        lokedhs 7y ago
        Activitypub is one solution. Write.as implements a blogging platform that federates with other platforms using the same protocol, such as Mastodon or Pleroma. They still haven't implemented support for seeing comments on the blog post itself, but once they have that it seems to be exactly what you are looking for.
      - brylie 7y ago
        https://wordpress.com https://wordpress.com is relatively simple, prevents SPAM, and has tools to discover and follow other blogs.
      - ekianjo 7y ago
        WordPress has been around for quite a while, yes.
    - bcrosby95 7y ago
      Some might say the difference is that normal people are using the internet.
    - na85 7y ago
      Seems like that'd be a good way to avoid the eternal September of the modern web. If "normals" are massing on Reddit and Facebook, maybe the wild west of independent websites is poised for a Renaissance?
      - HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago
        It seems like some subreddits are already those jumping off points to other places. r/sffpc has https://smallformfactor.net/forum/ https://smallformfactor.net/forum/ r/JDM_WAAAAT has serverbuilds.net Not to mention that some subs have associated / affiliated Discord servers- where you can directly chat with those at the forefront of the community directly.
- kbenson 7y ago
  With something like squarespace or any of the umpteen other design by wooden block site generator companies, or even Wordpress or Blogger... probably?
  - wazanator 7y ago
    But those aren't free necessarily and they're detached from one another. The thing that's attractive about Reddit is: 1. It's free 2. It's all under one site so it's easier for people to find a new community to join 3. You only need one account and it doesn't require an email address so if you have a one off woodworking question you can ask it without having to register on a new forum Websites are great for displaying information but they are not ideal for discussion
    - kbenson 7y ago
      > 1. It's free Blogger is free. LiveJournal is free. There's plenty of free offerings. Taken as an ecosystem, they are decentralized. > 2. It's all under one site so it's easier for people to find a new community to join The question was for a decentralized service. You can't really have everything under one site and be decentralized, because that one site can filter anything they want. I agree that people want that, but it wasn't the question. > 3. You only need one account and it doesn't require an email address so if you have a one off woodworking question you can ask it without having to register on a new forum Not really part of the question, which was whether the average person can make a forum through a web page. I think your points have merit, but they don't necessarily apply to the question that was posed, at least as I interpreted it and intended my response to apply to it.
    - zrm 7y ago
      > It's all under one site so it's easier for people to find a new community to join In theory you can find new subreddits starting from the main page, but it's more often because of people cross-posting things from somewhere you weren't previously aware existed. There isn't any technical reason why a decentralized system couldn't work the same way. Basically just need a standard way to designate posts as permissible to repost on other sites with a link-back, and then a button on the site that makes it easy to do that. > You only need one account and it doesn't require an email address so if you have a one off woodworking question you can ask it without having to register on a new forum Small sites should go the other way and use an email as the login name (distinct from the public display name if you want). Then you don't even have a password, to sign in you get an email with a token in it. Paste the token or click the link from the email and you get a cookie that keeps you signed in. Lose the cookie or want to sign into another device and they send you another email. Then "signup" takes five seconds, there's no login to forget (it's your email) and no password to forget (it doesn't even exist), so doing this on a hundred independent websites doesn't matter. You don't even have to use the email you actually read, you could use one exclusively for this type of account and then ignore anything that comes to it that isn't a site login token.
jacquesm 7y ago
Could something like keybase be adapted for this purpose?
bluecalm 7y ago
You can't upvote though. One of the nice things same Reddit is that you can go to a subreddit about something you want to learn about and sort for the most popular posts from last year (for example). Some kind of system like that for websites could become a killer feature.
- pault 7y ago
  You could treat a link to the post as a proxy for an upvote, and then rank posts based on how many other posts link to them. Of course you wouldn't be able to charge for this service so you'd have to sell ad space on the front page.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    That would be an exceedingly thin signal. Very few posts will have incoming links, so you'll get very little scoring data. The signal will be hugely susceptible to outlier bias -- The Post That Goes Viral, and generates a huge number of incoming links -- will dominate the rankings. Because the signal is so thin, distorting and manipulation (through link farming) will be cheap and difficult to detect (a small number of links across a large number of sites). Don't get me wrong: looking at incidental behaviour is useful, and can often be much more beneficial than direct actions. But remember that all of these signals are actually proxies for some ineffible quantity you're trying to measure, quality. (The very definition of which should leave you crying on the floor after a few hours. Or days. Or weeks. Or months. Or years....) May minds have attempted this task. All have fail. Your correspondent included. (Small site, many moons ago, since surrendered its electrons back to the Great Disk in the Sky.)
    - pault 7y ago
      My comment was a tongue in cheek reference to early Google. I can't tell if you missed the joke or just one upped me on a heroic scale.
      - dredmorbius 7y ago
signal11 7y ago
It’s a little more than just auth. Websites have different codes of conduct, different attitudes to humour/off topic content, and crucially different moderation and user safety policies. Remember on most random web forums you have no idea who can see your IP address (if anonymity is important). Much of this is true on Reddit too, except mods seeing your IP address, but most of the important info is consistently in the subreddit sidebar.
ZainRiz 7y ago
I disagree. What Reddit brings to the table is: 1. Easy sharing: Subreddits, which are an easy location to share interesting information about a common topic. Creating your own website is an order of magnitude harder, especially if you want to allow anyone on the internet to post to it 2. Discoverability: You can easily discover subreddits information related to your interests. Reddit's ability to aggregate the various information sources and present options that users find interesting is the biggest reason lurkers&voters (90% of it's users) keep returning.
- elihu 7y ago
  Also, a (mostly) consistent user interface.
  - ZainRiz 7y ago
    Which contributes to the easy of use/good user experience factor You don't come there for because "it has a consistent user interface". You come there because "it's easy to use!" (and you find it easy because it's consistent, like you said)
  - system2 7y ago
    As long as you use old.reddit.com.
    - cmonnow 7y ago
      I'm faintly surprised reddit's redesign didn't kill it, like Digg's did.
      - Baeocystin 7y ago
        There have to be some folks there fully aware of the dark-pattern hell of their redesign, and smart enough to keep old.reddit running to appease the people who appreciate what the old style offers. And I hope they keep it up! Reddit is pretty much the last forum I frequent other than here, and the day they kill off the older version is the day I stop visiting.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
danfo 7y ago
We could end up with an interesting solution with constraints like: - Self-hosted mostly-static sites - Open protocol Maybe: - Own domain - Own site is portal for aggregated views - Extensions (Install events, chat, ...) - Rust (minimal RAM)
- yoz-y 7y ago
  micro.blog is something like this, federation for personal blogs
aGeekGoneMad 7y ago
Why? Published an oauth API and let peeps go nut! I bet if some one like reddit did that I bet that there would be PHP modules and the like in days! There would be ways to cover the costs either by landing page or charging the child site per block of calls.
dragonwriter 7y ago
> There already is a decentralized Reddit where subreddits are called ...newsgroups... > and anyone can start one and run it as they please.
inamberclad 7y ago
Maybe a federation of blogs is needed? Everyone has their user pool so that a user on `blog-a` named `user` can post on `blog-b.com` as `user@blog-a.com`. Users would be free to explore a huge network while admins and creators would truly own their own little domain.
- retpirato 7y ago
  that sounds like mastodon for blogs. you can have an account on the main site mastodon.social & message someone on a different instance. Your username will show up as [user]@mastodon.social. you can also follow people on other instances & in turn content from them & others on their instance will be easier to find on your own instance.
Iv 7y ago
Accepting Github's, Reddit's and Google's Oauth allows you to have frictionless registration as well on any website.

hutzlibu 7y ago

"There already is a decentralized Reddit where subreddits are called websites and anyone can start one and run it as they please" But can your grandmother do this ... or just the common person?

jacquesm 7y ago
Once upon a time, yes.
- cjsawyer 7y ago
  It’s easier now than ever. The difference is that normal people don’t venture off the big websites now.
  - hutzlibu 7y ago
    It is easy to set up a site, to blog and people can comment and you do not get drowned in auto spam? Where and how?
    - flavor8 7y ago
      ...and enough people find your content to have a decent conversation without you having to learn marketing?
      - eitland 7y ago
        Try. My blog got 16 visitors from another blog today. (edit: it is now 23!) Won't make me rich. But it makes me happy that I am part of rebuilding an old style web. If you write about interesting stuff, post your website below and I might add a link and I don't care about nofollow and all that SEO stuff. Maybe 5 of my visitors visit you. You won't get rich but you will be part of something.
        flavor8 7y ago
        I did, for 7 or 8 years. It was good for my writing skills (and fun) but it was a little like talking into a vacuum.
        lokedhs 7y ago
        Activitypub is one solution. Write.as implements a blogging platform that federates with other platforms using the same protocol, such as Mastodon or Pleroma. They still haven't implemented support for seeing comments on the blog post itself, but once they have that it seems to be exactly what you are looking for.
    - brylie 7y ago
      https://wordpress.com https://wordpress.com is relatively simple, prevents SPAM, and has tools to discover and follow other blogs.
    - ekianjo 7y ago
      WordPress has been around for quite a while, yes.
  - bcrosby95 7y ago
    Some might say the difference is that normal people are using the internet.
  - na85 7y ago
    Seems like that'd be a good way to avoid the eternal September of the modern web. If "normals" are massing on Reddit and Facebook, maybe the wild west of independent websites is poised for a Renaissance?
    - HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago
      It seems like some subreddits are already those jumping off points to other places. r/sffpc has https://smallformfactor.net/forum/ https://smallformfactor.net/forum/ r/JDM_WAAAAT has serverbuilds.net Not to mention that some subs have associated / affiliated Discord servers- where you can directly chat with those at the forefront of the community directly.
kbenson 7y ago
With something like squarespace or any of the umpteen other design by wooden block site generator companies, or even Wordpress or Blogger... probably?
- wazanator 7y ago
  But those aren't free necessarily and they're detached from one another. The thing that's attractive about Reddit is: 1. It's free 2. It's all under one site so it's easier for people to find a new community to join 3. You only need one account and it doesn't require an email address so if you have a one off woodworking question you can ask it without having to register on a new forum Websites are great for displaying information but they are not ideal for discussion
  - kbenson 7y ago
    > 1. It's free Blogger is free. LiveJournal is free. There's plenty of free offerings. Taken as an ecosystem, they are decentralized. > 2. It's all under one site so it's easier for people to find a new community to join The question was for a decentralized service. You can't really have everything under one site and be decentralized, because that one site can filter anything they want. I agree that people want that, but it wasn't the question. > 3. You only need one account and it doesn't require an email address so if you have a one off woodworking question you can ask it without having to register on a new forum Not really part of the question, which was whether the average person can make a forum through a web page. I think your points have merit, but they don't necessarily apply to the question that was posed, at least as I interpreted it and intended my response to apply to it.
  - zrm 7y ago
    > It's all under one site so it's easier for people to find a new community to join In theory you can find new subreddits starting from the main page, but it's more often because of people cross-posting things from somewhere you weren't previously aware existed. There isn't any technical reason why a decentralized system couldn't work the same way. Basically just need a standard way to designate posts as permissible to repost on other sites with a link-back, and then a button on the site that makes it easy to do that. > You only need one account and it doesn't require an email address so if you have a one off woodworking question you can ask it without having to register on a new forum Small sites should go the other way and use an email as the login name (distinct from the public display name if you want). Then you don't even have a password, to sign in you get an email with a token in it. Paste the token or click the link from the email and you get a cookie that keeps you signed in. Lose the cookie or want to sign into another device and they send you another email. Then "signup" takes five seconds, there's no login to forget (it's your email) and no password to forget (it doesn't even exist), so doing this on a hundred independent websites doesn't matter. You don't even have to use the email you actually read, you could use one exclusively for this type of account and then ignore anything that comes to it that isn't a site login token.

jacquesm 7y ago

Could something like keybase be adapted for this purpose?

bluecalm 7y ago

You can't upvote though. One of the nice things same Reddit is that you can go to a subreddit about something you want to learn about and sort for the most popular posts from last year (for example). Some kind of system like that for websites could become a killer feature.

pault 7y ago
You could treat a link to the post as a proxy for an upvote, and then rank posts based on how many other posts link to them. Of course you wouldn't be able to charge for this service so you'd have to sell ad space on the front page.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  That would be an exceedingly thin signal. Very few posts will have incoming links, so you'll get very little scoring data. The signal will be hugely susceptible to outlier bias -- The Post That Goes Viral, and generates a huge number of incoming links -- will dominate the rankings. Because the signal is so thin, distorting and manipulation (through link farming) will be cheap and difficult to detect (a small number of links across a large number of sites). Don't get me wrong: looking at incidental behaviour is useful, and can often be much more beneficial than direct actions. But remember that all of these signals are actually proxies for some ineffible quantity you're trying to measure, quality. (The very definition of which should leave you crying on the floor after a few hours. Or days. Or weeks. Or months. Or years....) May minds have attempted this task. All have fail. Your correspondent included. (Small site, many moons ago, since surrendered its electrons back to the Great Disk in the Sky.)
  - pault 7y ago
    My comment was a tongue in cheek reference to early Google. I can't tell if you missed the joke or just one upped me on a heroic scale.
    - dredmorbius 7y ago

signal11 7y ago

It’s a little more than just auth. Websites have different codes of conduct, different attitudes to humour/off topic content, and crucially different moderation and user safety policies. Remember on most random web forums you have no idea who can see your IP address (if anonymity is important). Much of this is true on Reddit too, except mods seeing your IP address, but most of the important info is consistently in the subreddit sidebar.

ZainRiz 7y ago

I disagree. What Reddit brings to the table is: 1. Easy sharing: Subreddits, which are an easy location to share interesting information about a common topic. Creating your own website is an order of magnitude harder, especially if you want to allow anyone on the internet to post to it 2. Discoverability: You can easily discover subreddits information related to your interests. Reddit's ability to aggregate the various information sources and present options that users find interesting is the biggest reason lurkers&voters (90% of it's users) keep returning.

elihu 7y ago
Also, a (mostly) consistent user interface.
- ZainRiz 7y ago
  Which contributes to the easy of use/good user experience factor You don't come there for because "it has a consistent user interface". You come there because "it's easy to use!" (and you find it easy because it's consistent, like you said)
- system2 7y ago
  As long as you use old.reddit.com.
  - cmonnow 7y ago
    I'm faintly surprised reddit's redesign didn't kill it, like Digg's did.
    - Baeocystin 7y ago
      There have to be some folks there fully aware of the dark-pattern hell of their redesign, and smart enough to keep old.reddit running to appease the people who appreciate what the old style offers. And I hope they keep it up! Reddit is pretty much the last forum I frequent other than here, and the day they kill off the older version is the day I stop visiting.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

danfo 7y ago

We could end up with an interesting solution with constraints like: - Self-hosted mostly-static sites - Open protocol Maybe: - Own domain - Own site is portal for aggregated views - Extensions (Install events, chat, ...) - Rust (minimal RAM)

yoz-y 7y ago
micro.blog is something like this, federation for personal blogs

aGeekGoneMad 7y ago

Why? Published an oauth API and let peeps go nut! I bet if some one like reddit did that I bet that there would be PHP modules and the like in days! There would be ways to cover the costs either by landing page or charging the child site per block of calls.

dragonwriter 7y ago

> There already is a decentralized Reddit where subreddits are called ...newsgroups... > and anyone can start one and run it as they please.

inamberclad 7y ago

Maybe a federation of blogs is needed? Everyone has their user pool so that a user on `blog-a` named `user` can post on `blog-b.com` as `user@blog-a.com`. Users would be free to explore a huge network while admins and creators would truly own their own little domain.

retpirato 7y ago
that sounds like mastodon for blogs. you can have an account on the main site mastodon.social & message someone on a different instance. Your username will show up as [user]@mastodon.social. you can also follow people on other instances & in turn content from them & others on their instance will be easier to find on your own instance.

Iv 7y ago

Accepting Github's, Reddit's and Google's Oauth allows you to have frictionless registration as well on any website.