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I’m about halfway done writing a replacement to Reddit, with no adverts, no tracking, no data harvesting, no selling of your data, no algorithm-driven presentat

I’m about halfway done writing a replacement to Reddit, with no adverts, no tracking, no data harvesting, no selling of your data, no algorithm-driven presentation, no tracking pixels, basically none of the things that annoyed me about reddit. I don’t expect it to make me millions, or even thousands :), but it’ll be an experiment to see if a completely non invasive platform can work. Costs should be small, so I can keep it going myself for at least a few years and then maybe Patreon or similar to fund it if it grows to need that In some ways I’ve taken the opportunity to make things a bit better, the post editor has preview, moderations can be appealed, all moderations are public, the groups have hierarchy, edits can be viewed etc. Anyway, a month or so and I’ll announce it, currently in test at blewit.uk, because they did.

fragmede 2mo ago
I mean this genuinely, good luck! It's a tantalizing project to work on, I've bought a couple of domains for it but haven't followed through due to other projects taking precent. Maybe the costs will be small enough for the site to support itself. Technology has advanced since Reddit's inception in 2005, so server costs feel like it's possible to run on a shoestring budget, but if you go viral, server costs are anything but.
- spacedcowboy 2mo ago
  Thanks :) There's a whole lot of help out there for getting things started, in fact the technology part isn't the difficult part - its the legalities and hoops you have to jump through to stay legal (which are mainly aimed at <generic big company>, not <joe schmoe>). I've also taken a few decisions to keep things "lean and mean", so the hardware it requires is surpisingly modest, at least for getting going. Pushing as much as possible to the free tier of Cloudflare helps, and just one box behind the HA layer can manage ~1.3M req/sec if they hit the redis layer (which I ... encourage by design :). Even going all the way down through the DB and back, it hits 50k/sec - which is rendering, not i/o. That's ... quite a bit of headroom :)

fragmede 2mo ago

I mean this genuinely, good luck! It's a tantalizing project to work on, I've bought a couple of domains for it but haven't followed through due to other projects taking precent. Maybe the costs will be small enough for the site to support itself. Technology has advanced since Reddit's inception in 2005, so server costs feel like it's possible to run on a shoestring budget, but if you go viral, server costs are anything but.

spacedcowboy 2mo ago
Thanks :) There's a whole lot of help out there for getting things started, in fact the technology part isn't the difficult part - its the legalities and hoops you have to jump through to stay legal (which are mainly aimed at <generic big company>, not <joe schmoe>). I've also taken a few decisions to keep things "lean and mean", so the hardware it requires is surpisingly modest, at least for getting going. Pushing as much as possible to the free tier of Cloudflare helps, and just one box behind the HA layer can manage ~1.3M req/sec if they hit the redis layer (which I ... encourage by design :). Even going all the way down through the DB and back, it hits 50k/sec - which is rendering, not i/o. That's ... quite a bit of headroom :)