Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

• Lemmy

  1,603 12,815 9.8 Rust

  🐀 A link aggregator and forum for the fediverse

  

I was really skeptical of lemmy [1] when I first heard about it during the blackout. I joined yesterday and it completely changed my mind. Yes, it is going to face some growing pains (see the total user growth in the past few days) [2] in the coming weeks and months but it really has the potential to replace Reddit with a federated system of communities. One that won't be damaged by investors or executives attempting to pivot over to the latest social media trend.

As many people have recently noted, Reddit quietly became an extremely important repository of text-based knowledge. Distinct from Wikipedia and Archive.org, but no less important, Reddit is full of valuable procedural (how-to) and consumer (product-related) knowledge. Reddit has countless small communities built around hobbies and other niche interests, which places it in the same role once fulfilled by Usenet and later independent web-based forums.

While those technologies still exist, they face enormous challenges with discovery (try to find a new forum on Google recently?), single-sign-on, and moderation. These were all solved by Reddit and I believe lemmy solves them too. The fediverse [3] truly has the potential to liberate small internet communities from the vagaries of Big Social Media, of which Reddit is only the latest example.

[1] https://join-lemmy.org

[2] https://the-federation.info/platform/73

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse

• Reddit

  421 15,552 0.0 Python

I've posted this a few times, but there's a snapshot of reddit from 2017 that you can self host:

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

Why not just do that? Sure, it's a lot of python, and probably full of security holes, but there are enough reddit users to fix that, and the risk that your reddit instance might be taken over by malicious people is lower than the risk that centralized reddit will (since it already has been...)

Anyway, each time I link to it, I get crickets in response. Not sure why.

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com featured

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• Octal

  4 97 0.0

  Hacker News Client for iOS

There are some good HN mobile clients. On iOS I use (and purchased) Octal [0]. I find this particular mobile experience far superior to the HN website.

[0] https://github.com/dangwu/Octal

• lemmyBB

  24 193 6.2 JavaScript

  A federated bulletin board

  

It's a viable approach. There's even a proof-of-concept UX for Lemmy/Fediverse that's indistinguishable from an old-school forum/bulletin board: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB

Of course unlike an old-school fprum, on Lemmy you can choose to federate with other instances that pick up your niche interest. But it need not be the default.

Suggest a related project