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That's because the first users pushed off any community and looking for alternatives are mostly genuine assholes. They're only the first but it makes it so "alt

That's because the first users pushed off any community and looking for alternatives are mostly genuine assholes. They're only the first but it makes it so "alternative" sites are really off-putting during their early days and this limits growth. notabug.io was favorite reddit-alike: https://github.com/notabugio/notabug https://github.com/notabugio/notabug . It was designed to be both server<->server federated and p2p to bridge content between unfederated servers. But like above, it was quickly over-run with genuine assholes which made using it distasteful and it eventually died. The technology was and is amazing. notabug is a p2p link aggregator app that is: distributed: peers backup/serve content anonymous: but don't trust it to be psuedo-anonymous: users can create optional cryptographic identities immutable: edits are not supported for anonymous content mutable: edits are supported for authenticated content PoW-based: voting is slow/CPU heavy

spondylosaurus 3y ago
That makes a lot of sense. I'd imagine one way to counter this is to be proactive with content guidelines and moderation (even if you take a light-handed approach), but content moderation is obviously a lot of work, so you either have pay people to do it or find people willing to do it for free. And then we're back at the Reddit conundrum, lol.
kitsunesoba 3y ago
Yeah I think the only way you can get an alternative to a major social network site off the ground without it turning noxious in the process is if you can mobilize a sizable existing somewhat-grounded community to bootstrap it with to set the norms. This is hard to pull off though… even if you get a crowd that large through the door you've still got the uphill battle of attrition ahead of you.
r721 3y ago
>it was quickly over-run with genuine assholes which made using it distasteful and it eventually died Nobody knows what actually happened because the dev/creator stopped using all their known accounts in 2020, and yet the website was still working until Oct 2022 (see also comments here in case you missed it https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/zicasn/notabugio_gone/ https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/zicasn/...)

spondylosaurus 3y ago

That makes a lot of sense. I'd imagine one way to counter this is to be proactive with content guidelines and moderation (even if you take a light-handed approach), but content moderation is obviously a lot of work, so you either have pay people to do it or find people willing to do it for free. And then we're back at the Reddit conundrum, lol.

kitsunesoba 3y ago

Yeah I think the only way you can get an alternative to a major social network site off the ground without it turning noxious in the process is if you can mobilize a sizable existing somewhat-grounded community to bootstrap it with to set the norms. This is hard to pull off though… even if you get a crowd that large through the door you've still got the uphill battle of attrition ahead of you.

r721 3y ago

>it was quickly over-run with genuine assholes which made using it distasteful and it eventually died Nobody knows what actually happened because the dev/creator stopped using all their known accounts in 2020, and yet the website was still working until Oct 2022 (see also comments here in case you missed it https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/zicasn/notabugio_gone/ https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/zicasn/...)