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Is Lemmy the leading candidate for a viable reddit replacement? Are there any other serious efforts in this space? HN has such an insane depth of talent that I

by cpeth 3y ago

Is Lemmy the leading candidate for a viable reddit replacement? Are there any other serious efforts in this space? HN has such an insane depth of talent that I am surprised I haven't seen a few ShowHN posts that read something like: "Hi guys, I was bored last weekend so I thought it would be fun to build a reddit clone as a single Rust binary with an imbedded bespoke graph database. It uses a fine tuned LLaMA model for optional auto-moderation. So far it's handling sustained 1.6M / posts sec on my 2015 MacBook Pro. If I have some time this next week I will add distributed mode with Raft or CRDTs. Hope you guys like it."

reaperman 3y ago
The people who would enjoy building a reddit really don't want to run a reddit. The people who want to run a reddit, shouldn't.
- s1k3s 3y ago
  I have a 1:1 clone of old.reddit in my PC already, I built it for fun a few months ago. It's a one week task for a senior web developer anyway. The thing is though, most people don't care about these changes and will continue to use reddit with their official apps. It's just not worth the stress IMO.
  - KingOfCoders 3y ago
    And then there is IP blacklisting, prevent login after 5 tries, rate managing, all the edge cases ...
  - mandmandam 3y ago
    > most people don't care about these changes and will continue to use reddit with their official apps. Yeah that's probably what the Digg execs said, and StumbleUpon, and the Myspace guys before that. "Most people" will take notice when the people who made Reddit worth looking at leave. It might linger for a while, with rehashed posts from bots and the like, but it's walking dead right now.
    - riku_iki 3y ago
      > Yeah that's probably what the Digg execs said, and StumbleUpon, and the Myspace guys before that. it was early days when audience consisted of internet geeks. Today its also a lot of casual users who may not care about api drama much.
    - polski-g 3y ago
      Reddit was worth looking at because the creators were literally starting up fake accounts to ask/answer questions. This could probably be automated with GPT in today's age to make Lemmy or whatever a possible migration path.
- derefr 3y ago
  Why would building it require running it? It's just software. There can be a separate installation of it per community. Like WordPress, or any old phpBB forum. > The people who want to run a reddit, shouldn't. The people who want to run something that's like Reddit.com, shouldn't, sure. I don't see why e.g. a YouTube content creator shouldn't be able to have "a Reddit" (i.e. a single-subreddit installation of Reddit) in the same sense that they have "a blog" or "a Discord." The whole point there is that it's a cult of personality, so the moderation incentives align with the user expectations. I also don't see why a community like /r/AskHistorians wouldn't be excellent at running "a Reddit" of their own. (In fact, that would be much better than currently, as they could run a very heavily modified fork of Reddit that uses a moderation queue for comments; requires that toplevel comments on posts are either follow-up questions [according to some LLM] or come from verified historian accounts; allows questions to be merged; etc. ...Hey, wait, that's just StackExchange!) Also, did you know that LessWrong.com used to be "a Reddit"? That is, it was a single-subreddit fork — I believe the only one ever allowed, as some one-off gesture — of the proprietary Reddit codebase. It worked pretty okay for that community! (Though it never received updates from "upstream", so it code-rotted, which is most of the reason they moved away from it. This wouldn't happen in an open-source Reddit project.)
  - ris58h 3y ago
    > There can be a separate installation of it per community. "Reddit - Dive into anything". You will kill the UX with such separation.
    - derefr 3y ago
      I don't know what you think of Reddit as, but I think of it as two things: - a collection of independent niche communities that are just using Reddit for hosting, whose members don't think of themselves as visiting "Reddit" but rather as visiting those specific community forums. This is the valuable part of Reddit, that generates and gathers original content and novel discussions that can't be found anywhere else on the Internet. This is the part everyone's rushing to preserve/archive or migrate elsewhere. - a Usenet-like set of generic default-subscribed "category" subreddits, that just act as content aggregators to bubble up the "least controversial" stuff in each category from across the Internet. Nobody cares much about this (other than Reddit's investors), since it's just another view on the same content that gets surfaced through every other social network one way or another. If you think of Reddit as just the valuable part, and forget about the junk, then you can reinterpret the Reddit UX like so: Reddit just happens to have a single-pane-of-glass view for a feed of multiple communities' posts, just like Twitter has a single-pane-of-glass view for a feed of multiple accounts' posts. But 1. this isn't crucial to how users engage with these communities; and 2. you could preserve this property anyway, by having a shared SSO system (like how WordPress.com works) and by making Reddit-the-software federate its posts through ActivityPub. Then a "Reddit client" would actually just be a fancier kind of RSS reader that also knows how to post to individual communities' servers. But each server would still be "sovereign" over its own administration, being able to ban or approval-queue users, etc.
- quaintdev 3y ago
  People keep suggesting Lemmy but I think decentralized social media is preferred by technical people like us. But in real world only centralized social media seems to work. So why not adopt a model that will be good in the long run, how about something like Wikipedia non-profit Reddit alternative? Someone already did this [1] as stackoverlflow alternative [0]: https://codidact.com/ https://codidact.com/
  - holler 3y ago
    There already is a wikipedia social network created by Jimmy Wales himself. https://wt.social https://wt.social
    - kkarakk 3y ago
      Serves a 500 error if you try to sign up
- samstave 3y ago
  And thus, 'reaperman's law was born.
dt3ft 3y ago
I’m building one, but I don’t think it merits a Show HN. You can check it out at https://flingup.com https://flingup.com
not_a_shill 3y ago
The hardest part about making a new reddit isn't the technical side
- danenania 3y ago
  Exactly. It should be more like: "I hacked this together with the worst code you've ever seen and the server is crashing every 5 minutes, but a thousand people signed up today and usage is growing exponentially."
  - cpeth 3y ago
    Hmm I assumed the opposite. The mass exodus of long time users who are pissed about the API changes won't happen until there is a destination that can handle the migration without servers going down. It will be interesting to see what happens.
    - danenania 3y ago
      Focusing on tech and scalability before getting users will just result in a well-engineered ghost-town. People would rather use something slow and buggy if that's where the activity is. It's much more of a marketing and PR challenge than a tech challenge. Having a site that works well would be nice too, sure, but finding a way to get tons of users signed up (and keeping them engaged) is far more important.
ArjenM 3y ago
Time will tell where majority groups migrate to, I'm mostly afraid it will be ever more fractured islands that slowly fade for a good long while before one dominant platform slowly gains traction again as was the case with Reddit. Lemmy looks a little too technical for majority users to consider I'm afraid.
- gnoop 3y ago
  That's looking to be the case. Same thing happened with Usenet and the migration to web forums because Usenet became a complete mess. Some are going to Tildes. Some are going to Lemmy, though the two most popular servers are dying right now. Enough went to kbin.social that they disabled registration. Then there's mentions of Raddle and Mainchan depending on your preference. Discord servers with forums seem to be the big one from what my oldest was showing me. Seems that plus some additional web forums will end up filling in the gap. Reddit will probably still last for a while as it bleeds out users. We'll have to see what replaces Reddit. Nothing proposed so far is going to be the new consolidated home.
skrowl 3y ago
[dead]
b33j0r 3y ago
Haha, I’d say just wait another day. But what is the value of reddit anymore? I have one of the oldest accounts, and I loved it. Last time I logged in (not a joke) it told me I had a new free avatar that was a girl? That I’m stuck with? And I had to pay money to make myself look like a dude? And we thought hats in TF2 were lame.
armchairhacker 3y ago
Personally I think the best alternatives are what we’ve already been using: discourse, Matrix, Mastodon, Zulip, Github Issues, and community forums. For finding new interesting content, I strongly believe that instead of creating a new platform someone should create a “hub”: a centralized aggregator which presents all of these platforms in a consistent format. A place where you can find various forums and Zulip / Mastodon instances, get a feed of their posts, and even create accounts and make posts/comments; but it doesn’t host the instances or posts themselves, it just uses their APIs. It can also host some of the archived / scraped data from SE and Reddit for consistency. The reasons being: - The platforms I mention already exist for many communities, and there’s already a lot of difficulty in finding content. This has been a good idea way before platforms started closing off their content - Creating a fully-centralized platform is actually way harder than creating a decentralized one. At the same time, it’s very important that whatever platform we use is easy for newcomers, easy to find content, and fast; all properties of centralized servers. Hence, the centralized entry-point and hub but decentralized instances works well. - Mastodon has a centralized hub but tbh it sucks. Discourse, Matrix, Zulip, etc. have none. And of course there’s no hub which supports all of these platforms together. - I’ve only heard bad things about Lemmy and the UI is crap. I would absolutely love to help such a project but, like many unfortunately, don’t have the time or networking ability to start it myself. But if I see a Show HN or something similar which seems like it’s actually getting momentum I will try to contribute
- pig208 3y ago
  Interesting idea. In a sense this is also kind of "decentralized" in terms of hosting because you are just using the APIs, and the service itself will just be provided via a client managing the credentials. But I don't quite understand how this will be so different from Matrix has been doing. Basically, the application is just a centralized hub with bridge to different communities. Wouldn't this just be a "yet another standard" situation?
  - armchairhacker 3y ago
    Yes. What makes this approach really stand out is that, even if there are 5 different aggregators, it doesn't matter, because they're all aggregating the same data. And even if someone decides to use one of the existing platforms (e.g. discourse), posts/comments from this aggregator to the platform still show up. So this is actually a way to alleviate the "yet another standard" issue (though I acknowledge it won't be as good as a single common instance, due to different formats). Matrix is a start. But when I go to https://matrix.org/ https://matrix.org/, I see a giant header and "Try Now". When I go to https://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix-now/ https://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix-now/, I see a bunch of clients. When I go to https://app.element.io/#/welcome https://app.element.io/#/welcome and click "Explore Rooms", I see random forums including some russian forums. I think that you go to the site hub, you should immediately see a feed of curated popular posts and a "Create Account" form, similar to https://reddit.com/r/all https://reddit.com/r/all, along with a search bar and list of filters. And when you create an account, you choose some suggestions and get presented with various communities, also like Reddit. Most people are barely even going to try your site, if you want them to join and put real effort into contributing you need to present good content as fast as possible. Another issue with Matrix is that a lot of content just isn't on Matrix. As well as Reddit and other existing communities. For example, Rust has a subreddit, discourse, Matrix forum, and Zulip, and probably a discord somewhere too. There should really be a single platform where I can see posts from all of this, because I'm definitely not going to be checking each one individually.
hedora 3y ago
This exists: https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit
mayormcmatt 3y ago
I think the closest analog is Tildes. https://tildes.net/ https://tildes.net/
dsir 3y ago
I've been working on a platform with a bit of a different take on the online community space. We've built a place to monetarily incentivize ownership over the communities created on the platform and have been specifically targeting content creators to get them to offer their communities as a product alongside their content. The communities that form around content creators tend to be high in engagement and are a sort of naturally occurring beacon for connecting like minded people together online. That is the core of social networking after all. https://sociables.com/creators https://sociables.com/creators
busymom0 3y ago
I am the developer of HACK, hacker news app for iOS, android and MacOS, one of the top hacker news apps on the app stores. I have been working on a decentralized link + text sharing site called AvocadoReader for last few weeks. I describe it as a “Decentralized public community of communities for sharing links, text and media. “ I am hoping to have an extremely early beta next week. Here’s what I have so far. Got the post submissions and community creations working: https://imgur.com/a/mim2X9H https://imgur.com/a/mim2X9H I shared some implementation details here if people want to read more: https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13x0hzo/been_working_on_this_decentralized_reddit https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13x0hzo/been_wor...
- derbOac 3y ago
  Looking forward to this. I hope it goes well. I read through those threads a bit, but I'm wondering if you can say a bit more about why you didn't use the nostr protocol as is? I'm not trying to pull for criticism, I'm curious about the tech choices and how some of these emerging options differ from one another (I think I've read about two other nostr forum ideas now?)
  - busymom0 3y ago
    Nostr is pretty good and I was inspired by its idea. However, I didn’t like a few things and that’s why I decided to build my own protocol. 1. Nostr relies on Schnorr scheme for signing the data. While from my research, the patent on it has expired, I also read some other details on how there’s other pieces of it which are still patented. I am not a legal expert, so my understanding on this might be wrong and it might be in the clear. 2. Schnorr is fairly new and not used widely yet. It’s not even built natively in Crypto Subtle which comes built-in in all browsers. Based on this alone, I couldn’t use Nostr. My implementation uses ECDSA P-384 keys which can be generated using the browser built in crypto subtle library: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/EcKeyGenParams https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/EcKeyGenPar... So this allows one less third party library to rely on the client side. 3. The 3rd reason (and this was one of my biggest reasons) was that Nostr runs on websockets. I didn’t like that at all. Servers are already limited on the number of sockets they can handle. Plus it seemed like unnecessary complexity when vast majority of the developers already know how to use REST api. So instead of websockets, mine uses a simple REST api with only 2 endpoints: one for creation of records and other for searching for records based on filters. I shared more details here: https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13x0hzo/_/jmkplln https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13x0hzo/_/jmkpll... And here: https://old.reddit.com/r/nostr/comments/142v4lu/_/jnasose https://old.reddit.com/r/nostr/comments/142v4lu/_/jnasose
holler 3y ago
There have been and will continue to be numerous alternatives created all the time. The problem is creating a clone of X is rarely ever going to succeed, simply because cloning products doesn't create a compelling reason to leave the original (unless you have the resources/network effects of e.g. Meta). You can check r/redditalternatives for a constant stream of projects.
timeon 3y ago
Sometimes best alternative is just absence.

by cpeth 3y ago

reaperman 3y ago

The people who would enjoy building a reddit really don't want to run a reddit. The people who want to run a reddit, shouldn't.

s1k3s 3y ago
I have a 1:1 clone of old.reddit in my PC already, I built it for fun a few months ago. It's a one week task for a senior web developer anyway. The thing is though, most people don't care about these changes and will continue to use reddit with their official apps. It's just not worth the stress IMO.
- KingOfCoders 3y ago
  And then there is IP blacklisting, prevent login after 5 tries, rate managing, all the edge cases ...
- mandmandam 3y ago
  > most people don't care about these changes and will continue to use reddit with their official apps. Yeah that's probably what the Digg execs said, and StumbleUpon, and the Myspace guys before that. "Most people" will take notice when the people who made Reddit worth looking at leave. It might linger for a while, with rehashed posts from bots and the like, but it's walking dead right now.
  - riku_iki 3y ago
    > Yeah that's probably what the Digg execs said, and StumbleUpon, and the Myspace guys before that. it was early days when audience consisted of internet geeks. Today its also a lot of casual users who may not care about api drama much.
  - polski-g 3y ago
    Reddit was worth looking at because the creators were literally starting up fake accounts to ask/answer questions. This could probably be automated with GPT in today's age to make Lemmy or whatever a possible migration path.
derefr 3y ago
Why would building it require running it? It's just software. There can be a separate installation of it per community. Like WordPress, or any old phpBB forum. > The people who want to run a reddit, shouldn't. The people who want to run something that's like Reddit.com, shouldn't, sure. I don't see why e.g. a YouTube content creator shouldn't be able to have "a Reddit" (i.e. a single-subreddit installation of Reddit) in the same sense that they have "a blog" or "a Discord." The whole point there is that it's a cult of personality, so the moderation incentives align with the user expectations. I also don't see why a community like /r/AskHistorians wouldn't be excellent at running "a Reddit" of their own. (In fact, that would be much better than currently, as they could run a very heavily modified fork of Reddit that uses a moderation queue for comments; requires that toplevel comments on posts are either follow-up questions [according to some LLM] or come from verified historian accounts; allows questions to be merged; etc. ...Hey, wait, that's just StackExchange!) Also, did you know that LessWrong.com used to be "a Reddit"? That is, it was a single-subreddit fork — I believe the only one ever allowed, as some one-off gesture — of the proprietary Reddit codebase. It worked pretty okay for that community! (Though it never received updates from "upstream", so it code-rotted, which is most of the reason they moved away from it. This wouldn't happen in an open-source Reddit project.)
- ris58h 3y ago
  > There can be a separate installation of it per community. "Reddit - Dive into anything". You will kill the UX with such separation.
  - derefr 3y ago
    I don't know what you think of Reddit as, but I think of it as two things: - a collection of independent niche communities that are just using Reddit for hosting, whose members don't think of themselves as visiting "Reddit" but rather as visiting those specific community forums. This is the valuable part of Reddit, that generates and gathers original content and novel discussions that can't be found anywhere else on the Internet. This is the part everyone's rushing to preserve/archive or migrate elsewhere. - a Usenet-like set of generic default-subscribed "category" subreddits, that just act as content aggregators to bubble up the "least controversial" stuff in each category from across the Internet. Nobody cares much about this (other than Reddit's investors), since it's just another view on the same content that gets surfaced through every other social network one way or another. If you think of Reddit as just the valuable part, and forget about the junk, then you can reinterpret the Reddit UX like so: Reddit just happens to have a single-pane-of-glass view for a feed of multiple communities' posts, just like Twitter has a single-pane-of-glass view for a feed of multiple accounts' posts. But 1. this isn't crucial to how users engage with these communities; and 2. you could preserve this property anyway, by having a shared SSO system (like how WordPress.com works) and by making Reddit-the-software federate its posts through ActivityPub. Then a "Reddit client" would actually just be a fancier kind of RSS reader that also knows how to post to individual communities' servers. But each server would still be "sovereign" over its own administration, being able to ban or approval-queue users, etc.
quaintdev 3y ago
People keep suggesting Lemmy but I think decentralized social media is preferred by technical people like us. But in real world only centralized social media seems to work. So why not adopt a model that will be good in the long run, how about something like Wikipedia non-profit Reddit alternative? Someone already did this [1] as stackoverlflow alternative [0]: https://codidact.com/ https://codidact.com/
- holler 3y ago
  There already is a wikipedia social network created by Jimmy Wales himself. https://wt.social https://wt.social
  - kkarakk 3y ago
    Serves a 500 error if you try to sign up
samstave 3y ago
And thus, 'reaperman's law was born.

dt3ft 3y ago

I’m building one, but I don’t think it merits a Show HN. You can check it out at https://flingup.com https://flingup.com

not_a_shill 3y ago

The hardest part about making a new reddit isn't the technical side

danenania 3y ago
Exactly. It should be more like: "I hacked this together with the worst code you've ever seen and the server is crashing every 5 minutes, but a thousand people signed up today and usage is growing exponentially."
- cpeth 3y ago
  Hmm I assumed the opposite. The mass exodus of long time users who are pissed about the API changes won't happen until there is a destination that can handle the migration without servers going down. It will be interesting to see what happens.
  - danenania 3y ago
    Focusing on tech and scalability before getting users will just result in a well-engineered ghost-town. People would rather use something slow and buggy if that's where the activity is. It's much more of a marketing and PR challenge than a tech challenge. Having a site that works well would be nice too, sure, but finding a way to get tons of users signed up (and keeping them engaged) is far more important.

ArjenM 3y ago

Time will tell where majority groups migrate to, I'm mostly afraid it will be ever more fractured islands that slowly fade for a good long while before one dominant platform slowly gains traction again as was the case with Reddit. Lemmy looks a little too technical for majority users to consider I'm afraid.

gnoop 3y ago
That's looking to be the case. Same thing happened with Usenet and the migration to web forums because Usenet became a complete mess. Some are going to Tildes. Some are going to Lemmy, though the two most popular servers are dying right now. Enough went to kbin.social that they disabled registration. Then there's mentions of Raddle and Mainchan depending on your preference. Discord servers with forums seem to be the big one from what my oldest was showing me. Seems that plus some additional web forums will end up filling in the gap. Reddit will probably still last for a while as it bleeds out users. We'll have to see what replaces Reddit. Nothing proposed so far is going to be the new consolidated home.

skrowl 3y ago

[dead]

b33j0r 3y ago

Haha, I’d say just wait another day. But what is the value of reddit anymore? I have one of the oldest accounts, and I loved it. Last time I logged in (not a joke) it told me I had a new free avatar that was a girl? That I’m stuck with? And I had to pay money to make myself look like a dude? And we thought hats in TF2 were lame.

armchairhacker 3y ago

Personally I think the best alternatives are what we’ve already been using: discourse, Matrix, Mastodon, Zulip, Github Issues, and community forums. For finding new interesting content, I strongly believe that instead of creating a new platform someone should create a “hub”: a centralized aggregator which presents all of these platforms in a consistent format. A place where you can find various forums and Zulip / Mastodon instances, get a feed of their posts, and even create accounts and make posts/comments; but it doesn’t host the instances or posts themselves, it just uses their APIs. It can also host some of the archived / scraped data from SE and Reddit for consistency. The reasons being: - The platforms I mention already exist for many communities, and there’s already a lot of difficulty in finding content. This has been a good idea way before platforms started closing off their content - Creating a fully-centralized platform is actually way harder than creating a decentralized one. At the same time, it’s very important that whatever platform we use is easy for newcomers, easy to find content, and fast; all properties of centralized servers. Hence, the centralized entry-point and hub but decentralized instances works well. - Mastodon has a centralized hub but tbh it sucks. Discourse, Matrix, Zulip, etc. have none. And of course there’s no hub which supports all of these platforms together. - I’ve only heard bad things about Lemmy and the UI is crap. I would absolutely love to help such a project but, like many unfortunately, don’t have the time or networking ability to start it myself. But if I see a Show HN or something similar which seems like it’s actually getting momentum I will try to contribute

pig208 3y ago
Interesting idea. In a sense this is also kind of "decentralized" in terms of hosting because you are just using the APIs, and the service itself will just be provided via a client managing the credentials. But I don't quite understand how this will be so different from Matrix has been doing. Basically, the application is just a centralized hub with bridge to different communities. Wouldn't this just be a "yet another standard" situation?
- armchairhacker 3y ago
  Yes. What makes this approach really stand out is that, even if there are 5 different aggregators, it doesn't matter, because they're all aggregating the same data. And even if someone decides to use one of the existing platforms (e.g. discourse), posts/comments from this aggregator to the platform still show up. So this is actually a way to alleviate the "yet another standard" issue (though I acknowledge it won't be as good as a single common instance, due to different formats). Matrix is a start. But when I go to https://matrix.org/ https://matrix.org/, I see a giant header and "Try Now". When I go to https://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix-now/ https://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix-now/, I see a bunch of clients. When I go to https://app.element.io/#/welcome https://app.element.io/#/welcome and click "Explore Rooms", I see random forums including some russian forums. I think that you go to the site hub, you should immediately see a feed of curated popular posts and a "Create Account" form, similar to https://reddit.com/r/all https://reddit.com/r/all, along with a search bar and list of filters. And when you create an account, you choose some suggestions and get presented with various communities, also like Reddit. Most people are barely even going to try your site, if you want them to join and put real effort into contributing you need to present good content as fast as possible. Another issue with Matrix is that a lot of content just isn't on Matrix. As well as Reddit and other existing communities. For example, Rust has a subreddit, discourse, Matrix forum, and Zulip, and probably a discord somewhere too. There should really be a single platform where I can see posts from all of this, because I'm definitely not going to be checking each one individually.

hedora 3y ago

This exists: https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit

mayormcmatt 3y ago

I think the closest analog is Tildes. https://tildes.net/ https://tildes.net/

dsir 3y ago

I've been working on a platform with a bit of a different take on the online community space. We've built a place to monetarily incentivize ownership over the communities created on the platform and have been specifically targeting content creators to get them to offer their communities as a product alongside their content. The communities that form around content creators tend to be high in engagement and are a sort of naturally occurring beacon for connecting like minded people together online. That is the core of social networking after all. https://sociables.com/creators https://sociables.com/creators

busymom0 3y ago

I am the developer of HACK, hacker news app for iOS, android and MacOS, one of the top hacker news apps on the app stores. I have been working on a decentralized link + text sharing site called AvocadoReader for last few weeks. I describe it as a “Decentralized public community of communities for sharing links, text and media. “ I am hoping to have an extremely early beta next week. Here’s what I have so far. Got the post submissions and community creations working: https://imgur.com/a/mim2X9H https://imgur.com/a/mim2X9H I shared some implementation details here if people want to read more: https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13x0hzo/been_working_on_this_decentralized_reddit https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13x0hzo/been_wor...

derbOac 3y ago
Looking forward to this. I hope it goes well. I read through those threads a bit, but I'm wondering if you can say a bit more about why you didn't use the nostr protocol as is? I'm not trying to pull for criticism, I'm curious about the tech choices and how some of these emerging options differ from one another (I think I've read about two other nostr forum ideas now?)
- busymom0 3y ago
  Nostr is pretty good and I was inspired by its idea. However, I didn’t like a few things and that’s why I decided to build my own protocol. 1. Nostr relies on Schnorr scheme for signing the data. While from my research, the patent on it has expired, I also read some other details on how there’s other pieces of it which are still patented. I am not a legal expert, so my understanding on this might be wrong and it might be in the clear. 2. Schnorr is fairly new and not used widely yet. It’s not even built natively in Crypto Subtle which comes built-in in all browsers. Based on this alone, I couldn’t use Nostr. My implementation uses ECDSA P-384 keys which can be generated using the browser built in crypto subtle library: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/EcKeyGenParams https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/EcKeyGenPar... So this allows one less third party library to rely on the client side. 3. The 3rd reason (and this was one of my biggest reasons) was that Nostr runs on websockets. I didn’t like that at all. Servers are already limited on the number of sockets they can handle. Plus it seemed like unnecessary complexity when vast majority of the developers already know how to use REST api. So instead of websockets, mine uses a simple REST api with only 2 endpoints: one for creation of records and other for searching for records based on filters. I shared more details here: https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13x0hzo/_/jmkplln https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13x0hzo/_/jmkpll... And here: https://old.reddit.com/r/nostr/comments/142v4lu/_/jnasose https://old.reddit.com/r/nostr/comments/142v4lu/_/jnasose

holler 3y ago

There have been and will continue to be numerous alternatives created all the time. The problem is creating a clone of X is rarely ever going to succeed, simply because cloning products doesn't create a compelling reason to leave the original (unless you have the resources/network effects of e.g. Meta). You can check r/redditalternatives for a constant stream of projects.

timeon 3y ago

Sometimes best alternative is just absence.