13 ms·

"Looks like it's finally time to encourage my community to move to another site." where will you go?

dt3ft 3y ago
I’m building an alternative and I could use a hand: https://flingup.com https://flingup.com but I doubt people will jump ship, Stockholm syndrome?
- tail_exchange 3y ago
  How will you prevent it from becoming another cesspool for bigots? Seems to be the fate for every Reddit alternative, like Voat.
  - 14zadz 3y ago
    Its already pretty close once you look at some of the top posts on there unfortunately.
- KomoD 3y ago
  > Stockholm syndrome? No, all the alternatives are just terrible, I can't see myself using your alternative either.
- whycombagator 3y ago
  Not bad. I did see a racial slur on the first post I clicked on though (it was a comment)
quickthrower2 3y ago
cpanel->PHPBB fast install One does not simply: Ban self hosters
- SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
  Can cancel culture remove a forum? There are a few examples of yes.
  - vkou 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - busterarm 3y ago
      Even strongly antifascist[1] forums like ResetEra have famously canceled themselves and purged significant parts of their own community at times. [1]: Largely accidentally, as they earn it through being the most "pearl-clutching"-iest community on the internet.
    - safety1st 3y ago
      This is a harmful misunderstanding and mischaracterization of the phenomenon. Ordinary people are far more likely to get canceled than fascists because the cancelers don't hang out on fascist forums. They go after people who have slightly less "pure" opinions than their own in the regular communities they participate in. A classic example is the implosion of the knitting community - https://unherd.com/2020/01/cast-out-how-knitting-fell-into-a-purity-spiral/ https://unherd.com/2020/01/cast-out-how-knitting-fell-into-a... This problem predates the Internet and is a strong argument against mob violence as a form of protest. For example race riots in the US invariably occur in low income black neighborhoods, and the result is a bunch of black businesses get looted and destroyed. The mob is not capable of going to where the elite are and doing real damage to them so instead they trash their own neighbors and perpetuate the cycle of oppression. Similarly the cancelers tend to participate in communities that largely share their views and then destroy those communities over minor affronts.
      - vkou 3y ago
        No, yours is the mischaracterized take. The context in which the GP was speaking was running a forum. I've responded to it. You've responded by going on tangents about personal blowback for personal activities and, strangely enough, protests. That's not the threat vector that people trying to self-host forums tend to face - and even when it is, it's not that different from regular, run-of-the-mill mill stalking/and/or/harassment/chan-board-brigading/sub-brigading that anyone running any forum, self-hosted or not has to deal with.
- srgpqt 3y ago
  This situation looks like the perfect opportunity for sandstorm.io to gain some traction as an easy way to self-host chat and forums.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  As someone who administered several websites and forums with friends in the 00s: This. Buy some web server space and host your community yourselves. The majority of communities centralizing into Reddit, Discord, Facebook, et al. has been a mistake and is a stupid textbook lesson of why the internet was designed as a distributed network.
foepys 3y ago
I really hope it's not Discord... Discord is screaming to be next to go public and throw everything free out and then you will have to do everything all over again. Forums before the mid-2000s were pretty cool.
- flomo 3y ago
  > Forums before the mid-2000s were pretty cool. Largely because the internet before the mid-2000s was a fairly decent place to be. Some of those old forums are still running, and are still way more intelligent than reddit. But I would guess a large percentage succumbed to attacks from spammers, ddos, seo stuffers, etc, until the admins decided it wasn't worth it. Oh almost all of them had their password db hacked at some point, whether they told you or not, which pushes people to centralized services.
- busterarm 3y ago
  Maybe massive online services shouldn't be totally free? You say forums before the mid-2000s were pretty cool, but Something Awful is still going and has always been $10. I really don't want to be the product anymore. I would gladly pay for a good service with reasonable moderation. I'm paying for Discord right now, even.
  - yieldcrv 3y ago
    I think its a good question in principle, as it may spark introspection and innovation In practice in the present its understood that this is an uneconomical idea Maybe its free APIs that are a zero interest rate phenomenom
- bryceacc 3y ago
  am I using discord wrong? I see it as a chat and voice client, reddit has wiki's and posts... I have no idea how to discover old content that has been posted in discord besides searching but that's not really "discovering" in my mind. I can scroll through some top posts of all time in a subreddit to see what it's all about. How do you do that in discord right after joining a server?
- 3y ago
nichos 3y ago
Hopefully somewhere federated.
- jochem9 3y ago
  Lemmy is a federated Reddit clone.
  - Paul-Craft 3y ago
    Lemmy is great. https://join-lemmy.org/ https://join-lemmy.org/
    - Sunspark 3y ago
      What happens when the server op decides they don't want to run it anymore and pulls the plug? Or alternatively, when they decide they want to get involved with this or that.. server ops are dictators.. just because it is on the fediverse (what mastodon uses) doesn't mean they are mature people with contingency plans and codes of conduct.
      - Paul-Craft 3y ago
        What happens when YC decides to shut down HN? Or, alternatively, they do $THING you don't like? Worst case, with Lemmy, some server op decides to rage quit and shut down the server, and you're left in the same situation as if HN decided to just shut down without notice. In the other scenario, with Lemmy, you do the same thing you would if the same thing happened at HN: either play along or take your ball and go home. You're right that being federated doesn't magically make people into reasonable humans. If you happen to discover that technology, please let me know; I have several hundred thousand people I'd like to use it on for starters lol.... But, at least with Lemmy, you have an easy option to start up your own server if you don't like how someone is running one that you participate on.
      - ciex 3y ago
        Mastodon's account migration implementation has some serious issues. AFAIK you can't migrate without access to the original account, so if that instance shuts down you're out of luck. I think it's also not possible to move past posts to a different instance so if your original one gets in bad hands you cannot get your content off of that.
goplayoutside 3y ago
If anyone has suggestions, I'm all ears. Currently I'm looking at lemmy.ml. It has its issues, but they removed the hardcoded "slur filter" awhile back, and the UI is imo reasonable for non-technical users. Bonus points for being decentralized. I think getting this particular community onto a private Discourse server would be a heavy lift, and I'm not eager to add a server for 10k DAU's to my AWS bill. Imo Discord is a non-starter, for a variety of reasons. It's unfortunate that no substantial competitor to reddit is currently available. I would really like to see an alternative for those of us with niche communities. And it would be doubly great if reddit.com kept all the "outrage porn" that hits their front page, which seems to be what they're optimizing for anyway. For as many years as so many of us have been watching reddit's continual decline, it seems like a site that hosts small communities and offers similar functionality should have arisen by now. I think there are a lot of moderator-types such as myself who value the opportunity to serve our respective communities and would be happy to send a few dollars a month to a site that offered reddit-style forum hosting in order to provide a place online for people to gather and exchange information.
- tankerkiller 3y ago
  Instead of Discourse maybe NodeBB or Flarum (both are much lighter than Discourse in my experience)
- system16 3y ago
  I think Tildes (https://tildes.net https://tildes.net) is great. Invite only for now, but easy enough to get one.
  - dabluecaboose 3y ago
    Tildes is way too small, niche, and controlled entirely by its creator. When I first started looking for reddit alternatives, I got an Tildes invite and hung around for a few weeks before asking how one goes about making new subs. They're entirely made by the admin and subject to his discretion, so my request for an aquarium sub and a gun sub were just kind of ignored. It's going to be really hard for them to grow a real userbase as long as it's bottlenecked that way.
NovaDudely 3y ago
This is why places like Basement Community could have timed their launch wonderfully. https://basementcommunity.com/ https://basementcommunity.com/

I’m building an alternative and I could use a hand: https://flingup.com https://flingup.com but I doubt people will jump ship, Stockholm syndrome?

tail_exchange 3y ago
How will you prevent it from becoming another cesspool for bigots? Seems to be the fate for every Reddit alternative, like Voat.
- 14zadz 3y ago
  Its already pretty close once you look at some of the top posts on there unfortunately.
KomoD 3y ago
> Stockholm syndrome? No, all the alternatives are just terrible, I can't see myself using your alternative either.
whycombagator 3y ago
Not bad. I did see a racial slur on the first post I clicked on though (it was a comment)

quickthrower2 3y ago

cpanel->PHPBB fast install One does not simply: Ban self hosters

SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
Can cancel culture remove a forum? There are a few examples of yes.
- vkou 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - busterarm 3y ago
    Even strongly antifascist[1] forums like ResetEra have famously canceled themselves and purged significant parts of their own community at times. [1]: Largely accidentally, as they earn it through being the most "pearl-clutching"-iest community on the internet.
  - safety1st 3y ago
    This is a harmful misunderstanding and mischaracterization of the phenomenon. Ordinary people are far more likely to get canceled than fascists because the cancelers don't hang out on fascist forums. They go after people who have slightly less "pure" opinions than their own in the regular communities they participate in. A classic example is the implosion of the knitting community - https://unherd.com/2020/01/cast-out-how-knitting-fell-into-a-purity-spiral/ https://unherd.com/2020/01/cast-out-how-knitting-fell-into-a... This problem predates the Internet and is a strong argument against mob violence as a form of protest. For example race riots in the US invariably occur in low income black neighborhoods, and the result is a bunch of black businesses get looted and destroyed. The mob is not capable of going to where the elite are and doing real damage to them so instead they trash their own neighbors and perpetuate the cycle of oppression. Similarly the cancelers tend to participate in communities that largely share their views and then destroy those communities over minor affronts.
    - vkou 3y ago
      No, yours is the mischaracterized take. The context in which the GP was speaking was running a forum. I've responded to it. You've responded by going on tangents about personal blowback for personal activities and, strangely enough, protests. That's not the threat vector that people trying to self-host forums tend to face - and even when it is, it's not that different from regular, run-of-the-mill mill stalking/and/or/harassment/chan-board-brigading/sub-brigading that anyone running any forum, self-hosted or not has to deal with.
srgpqt 3y ago
This situation looks like the perfect opportunity for sandstorm.io to gain some traction as an easy way to self-host chat and forums.
Dalewyn 3y ago
As someone who administered several websites and forums with friends in the 00s: This. Buy some web server space and host your community yourselves. The majority of communities centralizing into Reddit, Discord, Facebook, et al. has been a mistake and is a stupid textbook lesson of why the internet was designed as a distributed network.

foepys 3y ago

I really hope it's not Discord... Discord is screaming to be next to go public and throw everything free out and then you will have to do everything all over again. Forums before the mid-2000s were pretty cool.

flomo 3y ago
> Forums before the mid-2000s were pretty cool. Largely because the internet before the mid-2000s was a fairly decent place to be. Some of those old forums are still running, and are still way more intelligent than reddit. But I would guess a large percentage succumbed to attacks from spammers, ddos, seo stuffers, etc, until the admins decided it wasn't worth it. Oh almost all of them had their password db hacked at some point, whether they told you or not, which pushes people to centralized services.
busterarm 3y ago
Maybe massive online services shouldn't be totally free? You say forums before the mid-2000s were pretty cool, but Something Awful is still going and has always been $10. I really don't want to be the product anymore. I would gladly pay for a good service with reasonable moderation. I'm paying for Discord right now, even.
- yieldcrv 3y ago
  I think its a good question in principle, as it may spark introspection and innovation In practice in the present its understood that this is an uneconomical idea Maybe its free APIs that are a zero interest rate phenomenom
bryceacc 3y ago
am I using discord wrong? I see it as a chat and voice client, reddit has wiki's and posts... I have no idea how to discover old content that has been posted in discord besides searching but that's not really "discovering" in my mind. I can scroll through some top posts of all time in a subreddit to see what it's all about. How do you do that in discord right after joining a server?
3y ago

nichos 3y ago

Hopefully somewhere federated.

jochem9 3y ago
Lemmy is a federated Reddit clone.
- Paul-Craft 3y ago
  Lemmy is great. https://join-lemmy.org/ https://join-lemmy.org/
  - Sunspark 3y ago
    What happens when the server op decides they don't want to run it anymore and pulls the plug? Or alternatively, when they decide they want to get involved with this or that.. server ops are dictators.. just because it is on the fediverse (what mastodon uses) doesn't mean they are mature people with contingency plans and codes of conduct.
    - Paul-Craft 3y ago
      What happens when YC decides to shut down HN? Or, alternatively, they do $THING you don't like? Worst case, with Lemmy, some server op decides to rage quit and shut down the server, and you're left in the same situation as if HN decided to just shut down without notice. In the other scenario, with Lemmy, you do the same thing you would if the same thing happened at HN: either play along or take your ball and go home. You're right that being federated doesn't magically make people into reasonable humans. If you happen to discover that technology, please let me know; I have several hundred thousand people I'd like to use it on for starters lol.... But, at least with Lemmy, you have an easy option to start up your own server if you don't like how someone is running one that you participate on.
    - ciex 3y ago
      Mastodon's account migration implementation has some serious issues. AFAIK you can't migrate without access to the original account, so if that instance shuts down you're out of luck. I think it's also not possible to move past posts to a different instance so if your original one gets in bad hands you cannot get your content off of that.

goplayoutside 3y ago

If anyone has suggestions, I'm all ears. Currently I'm looking at lemmy.ml. It has its issues, but they removed the hardcoded "slur filter" awhile back, and the UI is imo reasonable for non-technical users. Bonus points for being decentralized. I think getting this particular community onto a private Discourse server would be a heavy lift, and I'm not eager to add a server for 10k DAU's to my AWS bill. Imo Discord is a non-starter, for a variety of reasons. It's unfortunate that no substantial competitor to reddit is currently available. I would really like to see an alternative for those of us with niche communities. And it would be doubly great if reddit.com kept all the "outrage porn" that hits their front page, which seems to be what they're optimizing for anyway. For as many years as so many of us have been watching reddit's continual decline, it seems like a site that hosts small communities and offers similar functionality should have arisen by now. I think there are a lot of moderator-types such as myself who value the opportunity to serve our respective communities and would be happy to send a few dollars a month to a site that offered reddit-style forum hosting in order to provide a place online for people to gather and exchange information.

tankerkiller 3y ago
Instead of Discourse maybe NodeBB or Flarum (both are much lighter than Discourse in my experience)
system16 3y ago
I think Tildes (https://tildes.net https://tildes.net) is great. Invite only for now, but easy enough to get one.
- dabluecaboose 3y ago
  Tildes is way too small, niche, and controlled entirely by its creator. When I first started looking for reddit alternatives, I got an Tildes invite and hung around for a few weeks before asking how one goes about making new subs. They're entirely made by the admin and subject to his discretion, so my request for an aquarium sub and a gun sub were just kind of ignored. It's going to be really hard for them to grow a real userbase as long as it's bottlenecked that way.

NovaDudely 3y ago

This is why places like Basement Community could have timed their launch wonderfully. https://basementcommunity.com/ https://basementcommunity.com/