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Show HN: FlingUp, a Reddit-like platform Ive been building for the last 2 years

260 points by dt3ft 3y ago

dt3ft 3y ago
I am currently working on setting up a non-profit and plan to operate the platform just like Wikimedia runs Wikipedia. I see non-profit as the only viable, sustainable alternative in the long run. I am planting a seed, hoping others will join and help me build it, and soon enough enable me to step down. I have a full time job on the side and a family to take care of, and running this as a one-man-show is not an option. Tech stack: keycloak (auth) dot net core 6 typescript + react react router 6 bulma I plan to open source both the backend API and the frontend client. API documentation: https://api.flingup.com/swagger/index.html https://api.flingup.com/swagger/index.html A penny for your thoughts? Comments?
- sailfast 3y ago
  I agree that a non-profit whose incentives are aligned to support the communities and users that are on the platform is the right way to go. Unfortunately also predicting a number of sites get stood up as competitors and then eventually pendulum back and forth until some sort of network-effect equilibrium emerges but this looks promising. Not as familiar with dot net core and how it handles traffic scale up / DB reads. I'd gather it works OK for that sort of use?
  - pkos98 3y ago
    Lots of high-scale software runs on. NET like Stackoverflow or many Azure services. From programming paradigms it's essentially a Java clone so you scale vertically across OS threads (using abstractions like Tasks) and increase efficiency using async IO.
    - sailfast 3y ago
      Thanks for the answer!
- bunnyfoofoo 3y ago
  On Safari, getting: "Timeout when waiting for 3rd party check iframe message." And nothing loads. Works in Firefox though.
- ivolimmen 3y ago
  As a long-time reddit user I applaud the idea. It looks cool and I personally think that you are correct that any kind of social media (for the future) that would not feed on its user base (ads and selling user data) should be offered by a non-profit. Personally I would not have issues if a non-profit would still offer ads it's social media site; they needs income as well, right? Just hope they would not offer the ad companies the data of it's user base.
- sdwr 3y ago
  Doesn't sound promising to me. Pretty sure that the "real" path to success involves putting 100% in, to the point of artificially seeding the posts and comments for weeks/months. "Social" means already having an enticing place for people, whether you make it or fake it. You sound like you've already given up and are done with the project. Referencing wikimedia is putting the cart before the horse, that's fine when you already have millions of views and sweet sweet non-profit cash, but getting there is the hard part. TL:DR site is ok, will to win is not there
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    What you describe sounds more "fake it till you make it" than "will to win" :)
    - sdwr 3y ago
      Potato potato!
- ofrzeta 3y ago
  Interesting tech stack. Are you running on Linux? What's the hardware / cloud?
  - dt3ft 3y ago
    Bare metal dell tower for the time being. Linux is coming when redis caching layer is added, and I’d like to move keycloak on a linux node as well.
- justsomehnguy 3y ago
  > A penny for your thoughts? when you open Reddit (or any of its clones) you see a bunch of posts. They may resonate to you, they may not, but you do see them. Opening your site present me with nothing.
  - codetrotter 3y ago
    Do you have JS disabled or something? OP’s page loads fine for me and shows content
    - justsomehnguy 3y ago
      DDG on Android, but now it loads too. When I commented previously I've got that stupid loading animation, site header, site footer and nothing more. Which means the front page is served dynamically instead of from the cache and what there is no indication what there would be anything to be loaded (blank space instead). Considering I received some updoots for the previous comment I presume I wasn't alone with a blank page.
- kokanee 3y ago
  I have a fairly negative/pessimistic take on this model, but it’s my truth: Wikipedia, in my experience, is littered with some of the most aggressive, psychologically manipulative, and persistent ads of any major site. They just happen to be ads imploring me to donate to Wikipedia.
  - SahAssar 3y ago
    I agree that Wikipedias donation banners are very aggressive and the whole "Wikipedia has cancer" idea certainly seems plausible. At the same time does any other top-10 site have a non-profit motive?
    - kokanee 3y ago
      An idea I would be interested in is some kind of public-private partnership for operating internet services like social media, search, and wikis, which are necessary for the public good but have no viable economic model. The government provides the public funding and private entities build and operate the services, because no one wants to log into a government-operated reddit clone to look for onlyfans leaks. Maybe this could be accomplished with grants instead of donations?
      - kaba0 3y ago
        I think a reddit-like community could easily operate on a donation-based basis. Every development is open-source, and the operation costs are displayed on the site with a progress bar for the month until filled. It would be trivial amounts so it may not even need to be displayed, will be paid so fast.
    - muzani 3y ago
      Top 50? Top 100? I think scaling donations is difficult. Wikipedia makes hundreds of millions of dollars a year, but its closest competitor, Google, makes hundreds of billions of dollars. But to the average person, a hundred million dollars is a hell lot of money. So people get cynical. Also it's possible that donation models just don't work well. Dwarf Fortress is one data point. It was decent money at $15k per month, then people dropped 7 million dollars on the Steam release on the first month.
- gigglesupstairs 3y ago
  Hey, are you aware of WT.Social? It’s run by Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia Guy) and he just released its second version. The philosophy of your product seems aligned with his. See if you wanna contribute or partner: https://twitter.com/jimmy_wales/status/1668266400723488769 https://twitter.com/jimmy_wales/status/1668266400723488769
  - dt3ft 3y ago
    Thanks, I wasn’t aware of this project. I doubt he’d be interested, but I’d love to shake his hand and ask him for an autograph. That man is a legend! I’ll check it out!
- angrais 3y ago
  Why do the endpoints start with capital letters? It's the first time I've seen it and it's so unusual. Why?
  - Avery3R 3y ago
    It's extremely common in asp.net apps
- undefuser 3y ago
  I wonder how you plan to deal with certain types of content, like piracy, porn, gore etc.
ryukoposting 3y ago
The UI is fantastic. Sleek and modern appearance with snappy response and pragmatic layout. Just made c/nba! How do I follow a particular community?
- dt3ft 3y ago
  That's very kind, thank you. The following/subscription is not implemented yet, I've been building this on the side, so quite a few features are missing but in the pipeline.
jdlyga 3y ago
This is the most seamless Reddit alternative I've seen today. And it's already getting a bunch of posts. I like it.
- wetback 3y ago
  Fantastically straight forward sign up, no email required.
- notatoad 3y ago
  specifically it seems to be the only one trying to replicate the concept of communities. reddit is, at it's core, a place where people can host a community discussion board. the front page is just a very shallow window into that. all the reddit-alikes seem focused on reproducing the front page. something like tildes (or non.io at the top of HN right now) looks really cool, but it's just one community. you can filter and categorize all you want, but for any post there's just one discussion for the whole site to share. that's not a reddit replacement, it's a replacement for one subreddit, with some extra filtering tools bolted on.
Gualdrapo 3y ago
Tried to open it, it kept undefinitely in a loading animation, opened the web inspector, reloaded it and there only shows a Cloudflare message error saying that they blocked me from visiting it.
- ryukoposting 3y ago
  Do you have a VPN enabled by any chance? It loaded a bit weird the first time I opened it with PIA turned on. Worked fine after that, though.
  - Gualdrapo 3y ago
    No, definitely not. But it could be that Cloudflare keeps playing with us Linux users[0] as I've had some funky issues with stuff like indeed.com [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36197401 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36197401
NayamAmarshe 3y ago
This one seems nice. It's better than the other alternatives that were posted here. Probably needs a bit more modern UI but it's functional.
pkos98 3y ago
Loads pretty fast from Europe right now and UX looks reddit-like. Good first impression.
DueDilligence 3y ago
[dead]
rogual 3y ago
> Do not submit links or content with links to websites or businesses you own or are associated with. > You may only submit content to which you are the copyright owner. Interesting pair of rules!
- mberlove 3y ago
  Ditto on this... I also wonder how this meshes with "You can share just about any kind of link in FlingUp." and "Anything goes on FlingUp." (from the tour) It seems as though users may share links to whatever, but only content which they own. A difficult line to tread. For the op, I would ask for a little more clarity on the intent. (N.b. this might cause some issues posting AI-gen content, which is sans copyright by law, at least in the US. Maybe that's the intent?)
  - dt3ft 3y ago
    A rewrite is in order with clarifications. The intent is to minimize risk coming from users submitting copyrighted content (entire news articles which are behind a paywall, for example, pages or entire books etc) which could backfire if the organization/site grows. IANAL but this would have to be looked over by a proffessional.
    - esperent 3y ago
      That makes sense, but why don't you let people submit their own content? For example, if someone has a webcomic or a blog, or a photography site, or writes tutorials, or is making an amazing new app... Surely that's exactly the kind of thing that you want. Or at least an important part of it. As it stands it looks like you're saying only other people who find the webcomic (for example) can submit it.
- vvilliamperez 3y ago
  Basically, don't submit photos that aren't yours. That's what links are for.
  - 3y ago
trocado 3y ago
I like the snappy UI, but I think it needs a search box for communities/posts at least.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
AegirLeet 3y ago
Looks nice, but I can't register because Cloudflare hates Firefox users. (I was able to register an account using Chrome)
- AH4oFVbPT4f8 3y ago
  Is that what it is? I get so many issues with Cloudflare yet I didn't consider the conflict to be between Cloudflare and Firefox.
doix 3y ago
Looks pretty good and a non-profit seems perfect for something like this. I do have to say, I really dislike the card design that seems pretty much ubiquitous at this point. By introducing a border, you need to add a bunch of padding and then margins. Between two titles, you have padding (from the upper card), border, margin, border(lower card), padding. It's so much whitespace! How do comments work? Can you have infinitely nested comment threads? If so, I'm not sure your API will scale? Do you need to fetch replies for each comment recursively? That'll be a pretty bad experience, since you need to wait for one comment level to load before you can fetch the next one. But maybe I'm misunderstanding the API docs.
- dt3ft 3y ago
  The comments can be infinitely nested. You can see the comment model if you scroll down to schemas: https://api.flingup.com/swagger/index.html https://api.flingup.com/swagger/index.html
  - doix 3y ago
    Yeah I did look at the docs, hence my question. If you have a deeply nested comment tree, wouldn't you have to load each level sequentially? So let's say you have A (root) -> B -> C -> D Wouldn't you make one request to fetch A (root comments). Then a second request to fetch B (replies of A), another request to fetch C (replies of B) and then finally another request to fetch D (replies of C)? And you can't fetch B,C,D in parallel, because you don't know the id's ahead of time to request the child comments. Just something to think about, obviously doesn't matter until you have deeply nested discussions. But if you look at Reddit (or even HN) that is probably the most common case.
    - dt3ft 3y ago
      You’re right, and this was a tough design choice I made when I built the first prototype. Loading only first level of child comments should (correct me if I miscalculated this) be the most cost-efficient way as not every user is (hopefully) ever going to read all child comments in all levels in the hierarchy.
stavros 3y ago
There's currently an oddly similarly-titled post on the frontpage: Show HN: Non.io, a Reddit-like platform Ive been working on for the last 4 years Even the apostrophe from "I've" is missing in both. Odd.
- dt3ft 3y ago
  Correct observation. That post inspired me to make my Show HN submission as well. All other similarities are coincidental :)
  - stavros 3y ago
    Ahh makes sense!
eep_social 3y ago
> Become a Flingon today! I did! Looks slick. I hope you’re ready for the moderation gauntlet.
- dt3ft 3y ago
  Thank you and welcome! Did you open the browser dev console? :) An easter egg lurks...
halfbrite 3y ago
Tried to register, got hit with a Cloudflare error. Error 1015 You are being rate limited The owner of this website (realm.flingup.com) has banned you temporarily from accessing this website. Refreshing took me to an error page, which then tried to send me to: http://localhost:3000/ http://localhost:3000/ Thing is, the platform looks like a great start, so I hope this can be fixed quickly!
deely3 3y ago
Do you plan to add downvotes?
- dt3ft 3y ago
  I wasn't planning on it, but since HN has it, I don't see why not. I'd have the modify the ranking algo but it is doable, of course.
Arch485 3y ago
I like this. A nice QoL improvement would probably be to add an alternate card view where images/videos are expanded by default; that's usually how I browse Reddit. I'd be curious to see if the "no pornography" rule hinders growth at all. While I don't have actual numbers, I know from personal and second-hand experience that quite a lot of Reddit's (or the internet's in general) traffic is porn-related. In any case, I hope this platform takes off and succeeds. I think a non-profit alternative to Reddit would be awesome.
adamzochowski 3y ago
I don't use mobile, so I can't comment on that, but I can compare to old.reddit (the classic good version). Overall it is decent, but there is still plenty of work, Here are my comments, ignore if you don't agree. ---- Content loading: Initial Page old.reddit.com loads fast all content, without javascript. flingup.com instead is stuck on 5 blue bars bouncing because no actual content is loaded on first page. It is all loaded on some delay for some reason. Here is a thing: render content on backend, and if it is expensive, render it and cache it. The only good thing is that flingup uses own subdomains, unlike reddit that uses other domains like redditmedia.com / redd.it / reditstatic.com . I hate companies that use alternative TLD because it is hard to discern if domain is real, or used by scammers. Additionally, only 2 javascripts are needed to load flingup, and they are hosted from realm.flingup ... the other 4 seem to be some form of bloat. Basicaly, there is an iframe that loads something from realm.flingup on port 8443 and this iframe loads two javascripts. If these are so critical, why are they loaded through an iframe? why port 8443? why realm.flingup ? Sigh. the good part, despite flingup being js based, it supports middle click / control click on links correctly, unlike plenty SPA. But not all items, can't middle click to see user profile, instead user has to normal click, which does some odd useless popup with an actual button to see user profile. ---- Content look: information density at 30% old.reddit.com gives me 29 items I can see concurrently on my screen. Flingup only shows 9. ---- Content look: almost no comments loaded (25% of 40) I will ignore the fact that most items are just links, not discussions. But lets use the top link "migrating from reddit" as example. It has some odd 40 comments, but only like 10 are loaded, because the remaining are hidden behind a series of 'there are 3 replies'. Contrast this with old.reddit that will load 500 comments, up to ?8? levels deep (I counted up to 8, maybe more?) with a button to 'load more comments' either in a thread, or at bottom. Paradoxically, my other complaint is no option to collapse uninterested thread, or to link to specific reply (aka permalink) ----- Content: tooltips missing I dislike the '2 days ago' as it doesn't say when. old.reddit provides actual time of a comment / post when user hovers over '2 days ago'. Flingup doesn't. ps: fling sounds like a dating app. Cheers
- dt3ft 3y ago
  Thank you, this is very detailed and valuable feedback. Much appreciated!
dabluecaboose 3y ago
Another Linux Firefox user chiming in to say I can't use the site. Permanent loading animation, developer menu reveals a hidden "You need to enable JavaScript to run this app." message that isn't appearing, even though JavaScript is enabled.
- dt3ft 3y ago
  Thank you for checking it out. I will make sure firefox is supported, I don’t see why it won’t work out of the box, but I’ll investigate and roll out a fix asap!
  - dabluecaboose 3y ago
    Hey, just wanted to follow up and say the site is working normally on my Windows Firefox! It looks good! My only question/quibble is that I'd like to know if there's a setting to make the site full-width. I'm used to old reddit and hackernews being heavily text-focused and I hate seeing my webpages letterboxed into the center 1/3rd of my monitor. Other than that, I'm a big fan! Hope it takes off. Just made an account and a community!!
throwaway81523 3y ago
Why has everyone around here been writing a reddit-like platform for years? And aren't there a ton of those already? I used ieddit for a while (wow, correction) it still seems to be alive, www.ieddit.com.
- dt3ft 3y ago
  I did this in order to get hands-on experience in building a platform like this. A lot goes into it, even though it doesn’t seem so by looking at what is rendered. Full stack, from data model to frontend client. I was new to Keycloak, TypeScript and React, and this was challenging enough to learn how to use the technology behind. I learn best by doing.
  - throwaway81523 3y ago
    Nice, that's always a good reason to do something. It just seems odd that at least 5 of these have been posted in the past few days. I'm a luddite, I'd have implemented the API and not bothered with the front end at all, but that's just me ;). (Redreader is a good mobile API client, and I think Gnus can also talk to the Reddit API).
AH4oFVbPT4f8 3y ago
A lot of good advice can be found here with how Hacker News does things. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23439437 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23439437 https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/blob/m...
- dt3ft 3y ago
  Thank you, I’ll dig through this.
demizer 3y ago
I will support any platform to replace reddit that is 1) completely open source, 2) community driven, 3) moderators are held accountable by the communities they govern, and 4) not ad supported. Social bookmarking is something the internet should have as part of it's infrastructure. Unfortunately the fediverse face-planted in it's time to shine. The infra is the hard part and that all has to be controlled by the same org.
- rglullis 3y ago
  Would you like a pony as well? Not only you have conflicting requirements (something to be part of the internet infrastructure while controlled by a single org) your comment gives absolutely zero constructive criticism. What about the fediverse was so bad that warrants anything like "face-planted in it's (sic) time to shine?" How/who/what are you supporting that is trying to get to the goals you listed?
  - willis936 3y ago
    The internet infrastructure is defined by central authorities. You follow the IETF's and ICANN's rules or you are definitionally not on the internet.
    - rglullis 3y ago
      I am reasonably confident that DNS, TCP/IP and "social bookmarking" are each on different layers of the OSI networking model, but ok.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- gremlinsinc 3y ago
  I'd support the same, but I'd allow ads, as long as they don't sell user data, and add long as the company is structured as a co-op or non profit org, and have full transparency on what they're spending money on, and if there's enough kitty, give back to users who are the best at moderation, quality content etc...I think fediverse is too decentralized the best you can hope for is a DAO, built as a social enterprise, maybe every user gets to vote on major things with the company. the know karma, the more your vote counts, as long as there's a way to make sure there's no karma farms...
subless 3y ago
Title seems oddly similar to another Reddit-like post from today…. Show HN: Non.io, a Reddit-like platform Ive been working on for the last 4 years (https://non.io https://non.io)
- xeromal 3y ago
  Of course, that makes complete sense considering reddit is having a blackout for the next two days so people are hoping to capitalize on the turmoil. Definitely the best time to launch a competitor though they have a very steep hill to climb!
ZacnyLos 3y ago
Is it connected with fediverse?
dt3ft 3y ago
Has anyone found the easter egg yet? ;)
achalkumar 3y ago
This is good
planter 3y ago
>> You need to enable JavaScript to run this app. Sigh...
- mariusor 3y ago
  If you want a reddit-like that runs w/o JavaScript I am working on BrutaLinks, a federated link aggregator and discussion platform. An example instance is at https://brutalinks https://brutalinks and the code is on SourceHut: https://git.sr.ht/~mariusor/brutalinks https://git.sr.ht/~mariusor/brutalinks
Mandatum 3y ago
[flagged]

260 points by dt3ft 3y ago

I am currently working on setting up a non-profit and plan to operate the platform just like Wikimedia runs Wikipedia. I see non-profit as the only viable, sustainable alternative in the long run. I am planting a seed, hoping others will join and help me build it, and soon enough enable me to step down. I have a full time job on the side and a family to take care of, and running this as a one-man-show is not an option. Tech stack: keycloak (auth) dot net core 6 typescript + react react router 6 bulma I plan to open source both the backend API and the frontend client. API documentation: https://api.flingup.com/swagger/index.html https://api.flingup.com/swagger/index.html A penny for your thoughts? Comments?

sailfast 3y ago
I agree that a non-profit whose incentives are aligned to support the communities and users that are on the platform is the right way to go. Unfortunately also predicting a number of sites get stood up as competitors and then eventually pendulum back and forth until some sort of network-effect equilibrium emerges but this looks promising. Not as familiar with dot net core and how it handles traffic scale up / DB reads. I'd gather it works OK for that sort of use?
- pkos98 3y ago
  Lots of high-scale software runs on. NET like Stackoverflow or many Azure services. From programming paradigms it's essentially a Java clone so you scale vertically across OS threads (using abstractions like Tasks) and increase efficiency using async IO.
  - sailfast 3y ago
    Thanks for the answer!
bunnyfoofoo 3y ago
On Safari, getting: "Timeout when waiting for 3rd party check iframe message." And nothing loads. Works in Firefox though.
ivolimmen 3y ago
As a long-time reddit user I applaud the idea. It looks cool and I personally think that you are correct that any kind of social media (for the future) that would not feed on its user base (ads and selling user data) should be offered by a non-profit. Personally I would not have issues if a non-profit would still offer ads it's social media site; they needs income as well, right? Just hope they would not offer the ad companies the data of it's user base.
sdwr 3y ago
Doesn't sound promising to me. Pretty sure that the "real" path to success involves putting 100% in, to the point of artificially seeding the posts and comments for weeks/months. "Social" means already having an enticing place for people, whether you make it or fake it. You sound like you've already given up and are done with the project. Referencing wikimedia is putting the cart before the horse, that's fine when you already have millions of views and sweet sweet non-profit cash, but getting there is the hard part. TL:DR site is ok, will to win is not there
- wkat4242 3y ago
  What you describe sounds more "fake it till you make it" than "will to win" :)
  - sdwr 3y ago
    Potato potato!
ofrzeta 3y ago
Interesting tech stack. Are you running on Linux? What's the hardware / cloud?
- dt3ft 3y ago
  Bare metal dell tower for the time being. Linux is coming when redis caching layer is added, and I’d like to move keycloak on a linux node as well.
justsomehnguy 3y ago
> A penny for your thoughts? when you open Reddit (or any of its clones) you see a bunch of posts. They may resonate to you, they may not, but you do see them. Opening your site present me with nothing.
- codetrotter 3y ago
  Do you have JS disabled or something? OP’s page loads fine for me and shows content
  - justsomehnguy 3y ago
    DDG on Android, but now it loads too. When I commented previously I've got that stupid loading animation, site header, site footer and nothing more. Which means the front page is served dynamically instead of from the cache and what there is no indication what there would be anything to be loaded (blank space instead). Considering I received some updoots for the previous comment I presume I wasn't alone with a blank page.
kokanee 3y ago
I have a fairly negative/pessimistic take on this model, but it’s my truth: Wikipedia, in my experience, is littered with some of the most aggressive, psychologically manipulative, and persistent ads of any major site. They just happen to be ads imploring me to donate to Wikipedia.
- SahAssar 3y ago
  I agree that Wikipedias donation banners are very aggressive and the whole "Wikipedia has cancer" idea certainly seems plausible. At the same time does any other top-10 site have a non-profit motive?
  - kokanee 3y ago
    An idea I would be interested in is some kind of public-private partnership for operating internet services like social media, search, and wikis, which are necessary for the public good but have no viable economic model. The government provides the public funding and private entities build and operate the services, because no one wants to log into a government-operated reddit clone to look for onlyfans leaks. Maybe this could be accomplished with grants instead of donations?
    - kaba0 3y ago
      I think a reddit-like community could easily operate on a donation-based basis. Every development is open-source, and the operation costs are displayed on the site with a progress bar for the month until filled. It would be trivial amounts so it may not even need to be displayed, will be paid so fast.
  - muzani 3y ago
    Top 50? Top 100? I think scaling donations is difficult. Wikipedia makes hundreds of millions of dollars a year, but its closest competitor, Google, makes hundreds of billions of dollars. But to the average person, a hundred million dollars is a hell lot of money. So people get cynical. Also it's possible that donation models just don't work well. Dwarf Fortress is one data point. It was decent money at $15k per month, then people dropped 7 million dollars on the Steam release on the first month.
gigglesupstairs 3y ago
Hey, are you aware of WT.Social? It’s run by Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia Guy) and he just released its second version. The philosophy of your product seems aligned with his. See if you wanna contribute or partner: https://twitter.com/jimmy_wales/status/1668266400723488769 https://twitter.com/jimmy_wales/status/1668266400723488769
- dt3ft 3y ago
  Thanks, I wasn’t aware of this project. I doubt he’d be interested, but I’d love to shake his hand and ask him for an autograph. That man is a legend! I’ll check it out!
angrais 3y ago
Why do the endpoints start with capital letters? It's the first time I've seen it and it's so unusual. Why?
- Avery3R 3y ago
  It's extremely common in asp.net apps
undefuser 3y ago
I wonder how you plan to deal with certain types of content, like piracy, porn, gore etc.

ryukoposting 3y ago

The UI is fantastic. Sleek and modern appearance with snappy response and pragmatic layout. Just made c/nba! How do I follow a particular community?

dt3ft 3y ago
That's very kind, thank you. The following/subscription is not implemented yet, I've been building this on the side, so quite a few features are missing but in the pipeline.

jdlyga 3y ago

This is the most seamless Reddit alternative I've seen today. And it's already getting a bunch of posts. I like it.

wetback 3y ago
Fantastically straight forward sign up, no email required.
notatoad 3y ago
specifically it seems to be the only one trying to replicate the concept of communities. reddit is, at it's core, a place where people can host a community discussion board. the front page is just a very shallow window into that. all the reddit-alikes seem focused on reproducing the front page. something like tildes (or non.io at the top of HN right now) looks really cool, but it's just one community. you can filter and categorize all you want, but for any post there's just one discussion for the whole site to share. that's not a reddit replacement, it's a replacement for one subreddit, with some extra filtering tools bolted on.

Gualdrapo 3y ago

Tried to open it, it kept undefinitely in a loading animation, opened the web inspector, reloaded it and there only shows a Cloudflare message error saying that they blocked me from visiting it.

ryukoposting 3y ago
Do you have a VPN enabled by any chance? It loaded a bit weird the first time I opened it with PIA turned on. Worked fine after that, though.
- Gualdrapo 3y ago
  No, definitely not. But it could be that Cloudflare keeps playing with us Linux users[0] as I've had some funky issues with stuff like indeed.com [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36197401 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36197401

NayamAmarshe 3y ago

This one seems nice. It's better than the other alternatives that were posted here. Probably needs a bit more modern UI but it's functional.

pkos98 3y ago

Loads pretty fast from Europe right now and UX looks reddit-like. Good first impression.

DueDilligence 3y ago

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rogual 3y ago

> Do not submit links or content with links to websites or businesses you own or are associated with. > You may only submit content to which you are the copyright owner. Interesting pair of rules!

mberlove 3y ago
Ditto on this... I also wonder how this meshes with "You can share just about any kind of link in FlingUp." and "Anything goes on FlingUp." (from the tour) It seems as though users may share links to whatever, but only content which they own. A difficult line to tread. For the op, I would ask for a little more clarity on the intent. (N.b. this might cause some issues posting AI-gen content, which is sans copyright by law, at least in the US. Maybe that's the intent?)
- dt3ft 3y ago
  A rewrite is in order with clarifications. The intent is to minimize risk coming from users submitting copyrighted content (entire news articles which are behind a paywall, for example, pages or entire books etc) which could backfire if the organization/site grows. IANAL but this would have to be looked over by a proffessional.
  - esperent 3y ago
    That makes sense, but why don't you let people submit their own content? For example, if someone has a webcomic or a blog, or a photography site, or writes tutorials, or is making an amazing new app... Surely that's exactly the kind of thing that you want. Or at least an important part of it. As it stands it looks like you're saying only other people who find the webcomic (for example) can submit it.
vvilliamperez 3y ago
Basically, don't submit photos that aren't yours. That's what links are for.
- 3y ago

trocado 3y ago

I like the snappy UI, but I think it needs a search box for communities/posts at least.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

AegirLeet 3y ago

Looks nice, but I can't register because Cloudflare hates Firefox users. (I was able to register an account using Chrome)

AH4oFVbPT4f8 3y ago
Is that what it is? I get so many issues with Cloudflare yet I didn't consider the conflict to be between Cloudflare and Firefox.

doix 3y ago

Looks pretty good and a non-profit seems perfect for something like this. I do have to say, I really dislike the card design that seems pretty much ubiquitous at this point. By introducing a border, you need to add a bunch of padding and then margins. Between two titles, you have padding (from the upper card), border, margin, border(lower card), padding. It's so much whitespace! How do comments work? Can you have infinitely nested comment threads? If so, I'm not sure your API will scale? Do you need to fetch replies for each comment recursively? That'll be a pretty bad experience, since you need to wait for one comment level to load before you can fetch the next one. But maybe I'm misunderstanding the API docs.

dt3ft 3y ago
The comments can be infinitely nested. You can see the comment model if you scroll down to schemas: https://api.flingup.com/swagger/index.html https://api.flingup.com/swagger/index.html
- doix 3y ago
  Yeah I did look at the docs, hence my question. If you have a deeply nested comment tree, wouldn't you have to load each level sequentially? So let's say you have A (root) -> B -> C -> D Wouldn't you make one request to fetch A (root comments). Then a second request to fetch B (replies of A), another request to fetch C (replies of B) and then finally another request to fetch D (replies of C)? And you can't fetch B,C,D in parallel, because you don't know the id's ahead of time to request the child comments. Just something to think about, obviously doesn't matter until you have deeply nested discussions. But if you look at Reddit (or even HN) that is probably the most common case.
  - dt3ft 3y ago
    You’re right, and this was a tough design choice I made when I built the first prototype. Loading only first level of child comments should (correct me if I miscalculated this) be the most cost-efficient way as not every user is (hopefully) ever going to read all child comments in all levels in the hierarchy.

stavros 3y ago

There's currently an oddly similarly-titled post on the frontpage: Show HN: Non.io, a Reddit-like platform Ive been working on for the last 4 years Even the apostrophe from "I've" is missing in both. Odd.

dt3ft 3y ago
Correct observation. That post inspired me to make my Show HN submission as well. All other similarities are coincidental :)
- stavros 3y ago
  Ahh makes sense!

eep_social 3y ago

> Become a Flingon today! I did! Looks slick. I hope you’re ready for the moderation gauntlet.

dt3ft 3y ago
Thank you and welcome! Did you open the browser dev console? :) An easter egg lurks...

halfbrite 3y ago

Tried to register, got hit with a Cloudflare error. Error 1015 You are being rate limited The owner of this website (realm.flingup.com) has banned you temporarily from accessing this website. Refreshing took me to an error page, which then tried to send me to: http://localhost:3000/ http://localhost:3000/ Thing is, the platform looks like a great start, so I hope this can be fixed quickly!

deely3 3y ago

Do you plan to add downvotes?

dt3ft 3y ago
I wasn't planning on it, but since HN has it, I don't see why not. I'd have the modify the ranking algo but it is doable, of course.

Arch485 3y ago

I like this. A nice QoL improvement would probably be to add an alternate card view where images/videos are expanded by default; that's usually how I browse Reddit. I'd be curious to see if the "no pornography" rule hinders growth at all. While I don't have actual numbers, I know from personal and second-hand experience that quite a lot of Reddit's (or the internet's in general) traffic is porn-related. In any case, I hope this platform takes off and succeeds. I think a non-profit alternative to Reddit would be awesome.

adamzochowski 3y ago

I don't use mobile, so I can't comment on that, but I can compare to old.reddit (the classic good version). Overall it is decent, but there is still plenty of work, Here are my comments, ignore if you don't agree. ---- Content loading: Initial Page old.reddit.com loads fast all content, without javascript. flingup.com instead is stuck on 5 blue bars bouncing because no actual content is loaded on first page. It is all loaded on some delay for some reason. Here is a thing: render content on backend, and if it is expensive, render it and cache it. The only good thing is that flingup uses own subdomains, unlike reddit that uses other domains like redditmedia.com / redd.it / reditstatic.com . I hate companies that use alternative TLD because it is hard to discern if domain is real, or used by scammers. Additionally, only 2 javascripts are needed to load flingup, and they are hosted from realm.flingup ... the other 4 seem to be some form of bloat. Basicaly, there is an iframe that loads something from realm.flingup on port 8443 and this iframe loads two javascripts. If these are so critical, why are they loaded through an iframe? why port 8443? why realm.flingup ? Sigh. the good part, despite flingup being js based, it supports middle click / control click on links correctly, unlike plenty SPA. But not all items, can't middle click to see user profile, instead user has to normal click, which does some odd useless popup with an actual button to see user profile. ---- Content look: information density at 30% old.reddit.com gives me 29 items I can see concurrently on my screen. Flingup only shows 9. ---- Content look: almost no comments loaded (25% of 40) I will ignore the fact that most items are just links, not discussions. But lets use the top link "migrating from reddit" as example. It has some odd 40 comments, but only like 10 are loaded, because the remaining are hidden behind a series of 'there are 3 replies'. Contrast this with old.reddit that will load 500 comments, up to ?8? levels deep (I counted up to 8, maybe more?) with a button to 'load more comments' either in a thread, or at bottom. Paradoxically, my other complaint is no option to collapse uninterested thread, or to link to specific reply (aka permalink) ----- Content: tooltips missing I dislike the '2 days ago' as it doesn't say when. old.reddit provides actual time of a comment / post when user hovers over '2 days ago'. Flingup doesn't. ps: fling sounds like a dating app. Cheers

dt3ft 3y ago
Thank you, this is very detailed and valuable feedback. Much appreciated!

dabluecaboose 3y ago

Another Linux Firefox user chiming in to say I can't use the site. Permanent loading animation, developer menu reveals a hidden "You need to enable JavaScript to run this app." message that isn't appearing, even though JavaScript is enabled.

dt3ft 3y ago
Thank you for checking it out. I will make sure firefox is supported, I don’t see why it won’t work out of the box, but I’ll investigate and roll out a fix asap!
- dabluecaboose 3y ago
  Hey, just wanted to follow up and say the site is working normally on my Windows Firefox! It looks good! My only question/quibble is that I'd like to know if there's a setting to make the site full-width. I'm used to old reddit and hackernews being heavily text-focused and I hate seeing my webpages letterboxed into the center 1/3rd of my monitor. Other than that, I'm a big fan! Hope it takes off. Just made an account and a community!!

throwaway81523 3y ago

Why has everyone around here been writing a reddit-like platform for years? And aren't there a ton of those already? I used ieddit for a while (wow, correction) it still seems to be alive, www.ieddit.com.

dt3ft 3y ago
I did this in order to get hands-on experience in building a platform like this. A lot goes into it, even though it doesn’t seem so by looking at what is rendered. Full stack, from data model to frontend client. I was new to Keycloak, TypeScript and React, and this was challenging enough to learn how to use the technology behind. I learn best by doing.
- throwaway81523 3y ago
  Nice, that's always a good reason to do something. It just seems odd that at least 5 of these have been posted in the past few days. I'm a luddite, I'd have implemented the API and not bothered with the front end at all, but that's just me ;). (Redreader is a good mobile API client, and I think Gnus can also talk to the Reddit API).

AH4oFVbPT4f8 3y ago

A lot of good advice can be found here with how Hacker News does things. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23439437 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23439437 https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/blob/m...

dt3ft 3y ago
Thank you, I’ll dig through this.

demizer 3y ago

I will support any platform to replace reddit that is 1) completely open source, 2) community driven, 3) moderators are held accountable by the communities they govern, and 4) not ad supported. Social bookmarking is something the internet should have as part of it's infrastructure. Unfortunately the fediverse face-planted in it's time to shine. The infra is the hard part and that all has to be controlled by the same org.

rglullis 3y ago
Would you like a pony as well? Not only you have conflicting requirements (something to be part of the internet infrastructure while controlled by a single org) your comment gives absolutely zero constructive criticism. What about the fediverse was so bad that warrants anything like "face-planted in it's (sic) time to shine?" How/who/what are you supporting that is trying to get to the goals you listed?
- willis936 3y ago
  The internet infrastructure is defined by central authorities. You follow the IETF's and ICANN's rules or you are definitionally not on the internet.
  - rglullis 3y ago
    I am reasonably confident that DNS, TCP/IP and "social bookmarking" are each on different layers of the OSI networking model, but ok.
deleted 3y ago
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gremlinsinc 3y ago
I'd support the same, but I'd allow ads, as long as they don't sell user data, and add long as the company is structured as a co-op or non profit org, and have full transparency on what they're spending money on, and if there's enough kitty, give back to users who are the best at moderation, quality content etc...I think fediverse is too decentralized the best you can hope for is a DAO, built as a social enterprise, maybe every user gets to vote on major things with the company. the know karma, the more your vote counts, as long as there's a way to make sure there's no karma farms...

subless 3y ago

Title seems oddly similar to another Reddit-like post from today…. Show HN: Non.io, a Reddit-like platform Ive been working on for the last 4 years (https://non.io https://non.io)

xeromal 3y ago
Of course, that makes complete sense considering reddit is having a blackout for the next two days so people are hoping to capitalize on the turmoil. Definitely the best time to launch a competitor though they have a very steep hill to climb!

ZacnyLos 3y ago

Is it connected with fediverse?

dt3ft 3y ago

Has anyone found the easter egg yet? ;)

achalkumar 3y ago

This is good

planter 3y ago

>> You need to enable JavaScript to run this app. Sigh...

mariusor 3y ago
If you want a reddit-like that runs w/o JavaScript I am working on BrutaLinks, a federated link aggregator and discussion platform. An example instance is at https://brutalinks https://brutalinks and the code is on SourceHut: https://git.sr.ht/~mariusor/brutalinks https://git.sr.ht/~mariusor/brutalinks

Mandatum 3y ago

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