freedit VS fly-ruby

I've been checking out some of the reddit alternative software as of late, not so much the many different servers and communities around. Ones I've liked:

Kbin https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core

Lotide https://todo.sr.ht/~vpzom/lotide

Lemmy https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy

Brutalinks https://sr.ht/~mariusor/brutalinks/

Those all (are supposed to) federate. I don't think federation in these communities is always ideal, drive by posting and what not, I think a better approach would be a client that can read your followed stuff from a local list. But some non-federating options are:

StackerNews https://github.com/stackernews/stacker.news

Comment Castles https://github.com/ferg1e/comment-castles

freedit https://github.com/freedit-org/freedit

There are lots more, some are great some not. There have been quite a few posted on this site in recent days. Some communities really just need forums or wikis, link aggregation and content voting aren't really always necessary.

I do believe communities should host their own sites. Some communities just don't have the interest to be viable long term, and Reddit was away to externalize cost so that non viable communities can continue to exist. We see the results of that now, a company that isn't profitable due to bearing costs that nobody else is willing to bear squeezing users to try to stay afloat. This was always a temporary state of affairs. If you can't find a single community member dedicated enough to keep a VPS running, or with large communities, you can't scrounge up enough money from donations or whatever to keep the server running, that community simply isn't viable.

As you can see that almost all of these are very new projects, it could have been a bit bigger but I didn't include Reddit alternatives, that is why you don't see the main Lemmy repo and Freedit not being linked here.

Yes, it's Ruby on Rails! I'm using Hotwired on the frontend, which has been great for making discussions real-time while minimizing complexity. I'm hosting on Fly.io - I had used Render for a prior product (https://postcard.page), and found Render slow. Fly lets me set up multiple data centers, and they have an elegant little Ruby gem [1] to enable multi-region support on Rails without much fuss.

[1] https://github.com/superfly/fly-ruby

Fly is compelling enough to use without all the global deployment options they offer[1] but it's assuring to know if you ever do need to deploy globally, they can support that better than most.

[1] - https://github.com/superfly/fly-ruby

This is a good way to do it. Catching errors lets us reliably ship a library that makes this work for almost everyone, but it's not right for all apps: https://github.com/soupedup/fly-rails/blob/main/lib/fly-rail...