Alternatives to Reddit

I see reddit less as a website and more as a collection of communities. Each community has its own set of reasons for hosting itself on reddit vs other locations. Therefore I would predict that in the absence of reddit, not every community would move to the same place.

I also noticed that in recent years many subreddits have increasingly been taken over by memes and other low quality posts and so users looking for more substantial content have already moved elsewhere.

But some others have still been the best places to get early information on certain topics. For example /r/stablediffusion had a lot of people posting their novel uses and techniques for image generation. The QR code topic which is now blowing up here was already being talked about on reddit a week ago.

Reddit does two things really:

1. Link Discovery 2. Discussion

There are a few options for Link Discovery. I have a bunch of fora and sites hooked up to an rss reader (the old reader, since google shutdown reader) which does pretty well (although I'd like it to do a bit more). The link discovery thing is like the equivalent of having channels on your TV. You can stream any program (website) of a huge number but a channel gives you a reason to think about a specific one right now. I've been looking at https://pinboard.in/popular/, but it doesn't support rss which is a shame.

There's really nothing to compare with reddit for discussion of the links though (and that includes scoring and karma and responses etc). And a big part of that is because of network effects. Reddit is where the discussion is happening, because it's where the people are because it's where the discussion is happening. What's really awkward here is that some of the alternatives have ended up as seeding around communities that were too toxic for mainstream reddit. That toxicity will make it harder for them to grow.

I do find myself wondering what a system that connected my rss feed reader with global comments about webpages might look like.

The Fediverse/ActivityPub world has a few options: https://codeberg.org/fediverse/delightful-fediverse-apps#use...

Lemmy is the best-known in that list, but Kbin and lotide both look pretty promising, too - making my decision of which to spin up as a personal instance much more challenging :)

My ideal reddit alternative is spending less time on my computer and more time on in-person interactions.

We can look for and/or build Reddit substitutes, but just my 2c, this is a fine prompt to question not just the instantiation but the concept itself.

I would love to see an alternative that really focuses on moderation. Perhaps something that has three flavours of subs.

1. Public: these would be democratically run forums. The users would actually be able to vote for moderators, and perhaps even rules around them. This would be ideal for things like r/[country] or r/[city].

2. Private: these would be traditional forums run by the people who found them. It should also be possible for the "person" who runs it to be a corporation or similar group.

3. Personal: This would be a users own "twitter" like feed.

Other things I think would be needed are:

1. The owning company be a foundation like wikipedia, run as a non-profit.

2. The data and code should be open, so that if anything happens a clone could be setup.

3. Site wide minimal content rules set by the owning foundation. There are some things that should not be allowed at all.

4. Built in trainable AI agents. Moderation is a huge task and I believe it's on the site to supply appropriate tools. By trainable agents, I mean efficiently integrated machine learning models that moderations can personally update and train per sub to help them enforce the rules.

For technical discussion groups: USENET. Either moderated newsgroups or even unmoderated ones for obscure enough topics. Spam is the issue, but not much spam on USENET these days.

Also, the ham radio guys like groups.io, which is where yahoo groups migrated to. There are a lot of groups there on specific things, like Yeasu FT-857D transceiver. Groups.io has per-group file storage, which is handy for this.

Anyway on USENET, you can access it via google groups, but it's a bit non-obvious. Here is an example group:

https://groups.google.com/g/sci.math

But how can you find groups? You click on "all groups and messages" on the top, then enter a search term and hit enter. Then click "outside my org". When I do this for the term "france" it shows "4635 groups outside your organization". Open the list and look for the groups that have "." separators, for example "alt.france".

https://groups.google.com/g/alt.france

The ones without the dot separators are google groups- if you post, the message does not go outside of google. I don't know if you can create a USENET newsgroup through google groups- probably not.

It's kind of crap for discovery, but OK once you have a set of groups you use often.

Edit: actually a better way for discovery is a website like this: http://www.harley.com/usenet/master-list/index.html Once you have the name of the newsgroup, just append it to the groups.google.com/g/ (also the site provides a link).

Whenever a site does something "bad" (Twitter and musk's BS, Reddit with their API nonsense, etc) people's initial reaction is to look for a site JUST like it but without the bad thing. That feels like stage 1 of grief: denial. Denial that the thing you loved is no longer the same. Maybe it's dead, or maybe its changed in such a drastic way thats its no longer the same thing. Regardless, I have never seen a successful website or service start from the premise of "we will be just like thing X, but without the bad thing". You need more than that. You need a vision. And I'd argue your initial motivation needs to be something positive, not negative. If you're initial motivation is "this website is doing something bad, so we need to make a similar site that doesn't do that" then you are motivated by a negative emotion, which will only drive you so far. You'll be driven by anger which might get a bunch of new users, but that emotion will fade, and after a while what will you have left? That isn't to say that situations like this aren't a great opportunity. Far from it. It's just that the opportunity requires people to think creatively. For sure learn from the mistakes of these companies, but also don't just create a clone that positions itself as a direct competitor or a home for refugees. That's just depressing and a recipe for failure.

Reddit is just one place I read content. The other is https://lobste.rs/ I am always looking for interesting technical content to read. I want to learn. I would like to read your technical blog!

If you don't have a blog, then you could try what I do, I promise it's minimal effort and easy to maintain and host and it costs nothing financial (except time you use to write)

Go to GitHub, create a repository and tick the checkbox for including README.md.

Then go to README.md and click the Edit icion in the top right corner.

Write into this README.md file whenever you blog, creating a markdown heading with the blog post's title. You could include a date if you want.

Please do this! It's a low tech solution to content to read.

https://sqwok.im

- All posts fully public and google indexed.

- Built-in realtime chat rooms instead of threaded comments on all posts, complete with presence, @mentions, markdown support (check faq)(mobile & desktop web supported currently).

- Trending based on chat activity and time decay.

- Search, notifications, follows, themes, other settings like block a user.

- Focus on simplicity, accessibility, usability.

Previous Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31160302

I'd taken some time off the project over the past several months to focus on regular work/life but still planning to release new features and push the project forward, with an upgrade to chat/presence to be released imminently and long-form posts to follow.

Have been blessed to see people from all over the globe use this silly site I built because I wanted to use it myself.

If you find it interesting please let me know how we can improve it etc.

Also if you think you could bring something to this project and have interest feel free to reach out by email.

God what a mess.

If anyone else is interested I made a browser extension you can use to batch delete your Reddit posts and comments: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bulk-delete-reddit...

Let me know how it works for you if you try it! Still fixing bugs.

The one being promoted the most on migrations subreddits is Kbin (particularly kbin.social for sign-up). It federates with Lemmy as well - apparently some folks think the Lemmy devs have questionable moral character so decided not to promote Lemmy as a primary option (hell if I know, didn't look into it).

That Kbin instance is getting slammed and trying to scale up right now - many identical /r/{subreddit} are now available at /m/{subreddit} (m for magazine) thanks to some of the prior subreddit mods I guess?

Comprehensive? No. Nothing even comes close to the scale that reddit has for the niche that Reddit has.

For local things, consider instead Facebook groups and nextdoor... not that I think that those are good alternatives. There may be a slack channel or discord group too - though those fill different (but often similar) roles.

One of the issues that you'll see with this is that you'll need multiple accounts to handle the disparate sites (well, many of them have a sign on with Google or Facebook) - there's no "one stop spot for everything".

And despite claims of power hungry mods on reddit, it becomes clear why something is needed if you spend any time looking at Nextdoor and Facebook.

What do you want, exactly?

I've been running a forum for 15 years. It's now horrible, outdated software, full of bugs and probably security holes. However, it works. It has an active community. It requires almost zero maintenance on my end. A cheap VPS will do the trick.

Before Reddit, people would just type in "forum" when doing a Google search. That should still do the trick. For example a Google search for, how to tie a knot "forum" brings up many forum discussions.

I've written a bit about this before, but fundamentally Reddit has a misalignment between the needs of the user and the needs of the platform[1].

There's a great list of alternatives here, https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/yttdlc/... though if you are choosing one, I'd highly encourage you to find / try one that relies on a federated or a paid model. A free model will eventually end up in the same situation we're in today.

[1] https://non.io/reddit-has-platform-user-misalignment

Somewhat related, but I'd love for Apolloapp to break free from the Reddit API and simply become its own thing. It's backed by, depending on how you measure things, probably almost 50% of the Reddit community as it is. With some VC backing, or simply just crowdfunding to start things off, and continuous support from the subreddits that have gone dark, it could very well become a thing.

Aside: I notice HN has been really slow today, possibly due to people not being on reddit coming here instead.

I don't know how accurate or up-to-date this list is, but it seems like a reasonable place to start.

It's an attempt at mapping subreddits to places in the fediverse.

https://browse.feddit.de/

I've seen Lemmy paraded around, it ha promise but you gotta diy your community. My biggest concern with the fediverse is trust. Trust takes a while to establish.

Looking back, man usenet's format was kinda similar to reddit wasn't it? Usenet with voting.

Idk about y'all but this is actually kinda super fun. I'd love to reintroduce some modernized takes on old school platforms. The internet was more fun before everything got consolidated anyway.

Why do we keep using private residences to host these parties, when we could be having them out in the streets where no one can take ownership of them?

Reinvent usenet with modern web technology. All posts replicate, with verifiable authenticity, and the website presentation remains up to the instance host on what it should look like.

Run a node, host an API for 3 bucks a year so that mobile clients can pull data. Run a website, host it with free accounts and spam it. Let people decide how they want to pay - wallets or eyes - but just stop hoarding the damned conversations.

I have not found any serious alternatives. The main problem is the chicken and egg problem where no one cares unless other people are using it. I created my own alternative as a side project (https://zsync.xyz) with some differences (eg. tags instead of subreddits), but there are no users - and why should there be?

I used to use Reddit pretty heavily, but I stopped when I realized outside a few small use cases it wasn't benefitting my life and was mostly a time sink. I find that HN and Twitter is enough for my "social media" needs.

I do hope we see a better alternative to Reddit though, one focused on fostering high quality. Reddit was like that in 2008-9 when I joined, but in just a few years devolved into the meme dumpster and PC hivemind. The Reddit founders and their investors (cough YC *cough) should be embarrassed. It's like raising a child prodigy with the potential to cure cancer only for that kid to grow up into some grifting alcoholic bum who just smokes weed all day and survives off of fake disability benefits.

Reddit alternatives:

Beehaw https://beehaw.org/

Kbin Social https://kbin.social/

The killer feature of Reddit (or any other silo) is that you don't have to maintain it. Even when your interest change and hobby x no longer interests you, the content you put there stays there. I've seen so many small community websites come and go, fall into disarray, succumb to spam and eventually close down. Maintaining pages long term is hard.

Nothing that is at the same scale as Reddit. The only real alternatives are niche forums which have been around forever now.

It depends what you're looking for. To replace the link aggregation features, I've gone back to using RSS over the past year and I'm pleased with it. I get the same news that is spread across the various subreddits, and often times news sites will report on stuff directly from reddit.

For the actually discussions or more niche content, there isn't much. There are some Reddit-specific alternatives popping up, but unless Reddit itself really dies I doubt they'll get much traction. Your other options are the other social media platforms, which have their own issues and aren't quite the same.

There's a list here

https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/

Or there would be, if reddit weren't offline

There is a subreddit about Reddit alternatives:

https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/

I don't use reddit directly as a user, but last night I was googling a tech question that had a bunch of relevant results in Reddit threads... only to find that the relevant subreddit had been put into "private" mode in protest of API changes, leaving the content inaccessible.

So even though I don't necessarily pull up Reddit just to read, it does provide a good archive of questions and answers or other useful explanations in search engine results and losing that old content would be tough.

Usenet.

Almost abandoned, full of spam, but still there: a decentralized network where anyone can run their own server, serving just to them or to someone or too anyone the groups they want. Groups are far more discoverable than Reddit subs and they work pretty well. Bonus: messages can be stored and then indexed locally as anyone might wish.

In general: using a platform owned by someone else meant no real guarantee, being part of a communitarian platform, owning the bit we are interested in, means we are Citizens peers, between peers.

If Reddit concern you try to imaging a fleet of leased connected cars, your webmail (with someone else domain name and no messages on your iron), even the "modern smart city" where anything is a service.

When you'll see https://www.forbes.com/sites/worldeconomicforum/2016/11/10/s... you'll understand why we are there in IT terms and where is the future. IT state of thing is just few years in the future respect of the rest of the society.

I set up my own Lemmy server for now. (https://civilloquy.com/)

I'm not sure I see a ton of the benefits to federation, but it kind of lets a lot of services which would otherwise compete get a more substantial user base off the get-go. There still are no services with a user base to provide a comparable experience to reddit, but it has to start somewhere.

We don't have a community yet, but sift (https://sift.quest/) is aiming to be a comprehensive alternative.

We've got some new ideas around dealing with cross posts: * posts can have multiple tags and be findable from any of them * all posts to the same url map to the same backend node (so you don't get as many duplicates)

I'm actually most excited about what we're trying to do with regards to the low effort content and degradation of communities aspects.

At our core we're actually a reputation/trust/"how much do I want to see things from this person" graph that has recently pivoted to being a Reddit alternative. This means that (once we get the community going and our algorithms tuned up), we should be able to offer you much more ergonomic ability to choose how much of what kind of content you want to see (people who like memes can post them, but you can choose not to see them.

We're still in alpha and don't have much of a community yet, but we're adding features fast and will be very friendly and responsive to any feature requests you have.

Mods: this valuable discussion has dropped from the main page without being a flamewar

HN is a well honed functional equivalent to a subreddit... Could it become the centerpiece for a free software self-hosted self-standing subreddit ?

For the last few years, I've mainly used reddit as a way of sifting through search engine results to a better answer more quickly: e.g. "what is the answer to x reddit". I've been sick of overly SEO-optimized websites that are full of fluff and ads and don't easily surface information. I'm curious, if people do move from reddit, what my new search term will be.

I'm going to be self-serving and mention https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/

Using the Qbix platform you can assemble your own reddit, and then invite people to it, in a matter of hours.

It's free and open source, and runs on PHP. Any commodity host that runs Wordpress should be able to run it, but if you want you can use Node.js

It also integrates with Discourse, if you want to have a robust forum software that is also actively developed by a sister team.

PS: If you do play around and install it, you should apply to https://qbix.com/ecosystem so you can be a host. Qbix is going to eventually join the fediverse but right now it's more about being a viable decentralized replacement for Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, etc.

Check out an app called Artifact, if you're looking for that infinite scroll on published articles relevant to you.

It's made by the original founders of Instagram, and they're using AI in some interesting ways, e.g. rewriting clickbait headlines. Their Reader View is nice too, though I wish I could set it as default on each page open.

Today I realized how much of a habit I was in checking certain subreddits like r/boardgames and r/woodworking. Probably three times today I have gone to Reddit out of habit, only to remember that I no longer have access to my customary subreddits. I’m hoping this time of blackout will break me of the Reddit habit.

Scale comes with time and engagement - right now, nothing is at the same scale. If the API costs, accessibility issues, and lackluster mod tools issues are not resolved in a timely and amicable manner, the scales will change as they have done time after time.

The current VC investors should also consider if the existing CEO is fit for the role, given their apparant personal attacks and defamation against a third-party developer, and the public proof that these were unwarranted.

A lot of the existing alternatives skew to the left or right of the political spectrum. The ideal platform would welcome all, and not witch hunt one or the other. Tildes seems to fit that but is invite only. Squabbles also, but it's not /quite/ the same as Reddit.

Forums are the way to go for now.

What I would love to see is a hand-picked curated list of forums, a la dmoz but for social, with reviews.

It’s not a one to one alternative but I’ve gradually moved from reddit to twitter to get my news and find interesting takes on whatever topics I’m interested in.

I just follow a few interesting people for whatever topics I want to follow. In fact the “for you” page has been giving me decent recommendations lately.

I’d like to think that people might use this opportunity to move to distributed options like rss with forums operated independently or maybe federated alternatives but neither of those options are easy enough from an end-user standpoint to get traction against the next big link-aggregator site

I use https://raddle.me/ but it's small for now. They seem to have a much better approach to moderation at least but the API is lackluster, but it's open source so hopefully it should improve

Comprehensive? The internet would be my first choice.

The fact is, all community organization online being on one site is an awful idea as we see with this and other things that have happened in the past. Communities should host their own forums.

Searchability... The truth is that Google isn't a search engine, it's a content aggregator now. It doesn't even index the internet! And it blocks valid results, for reasons ranging from "its a pirate site" to "we don't want you knowing these things". This site:reddit.com thing is a workaround, because sites like reddit have taken over enthusiast run information depos on the internet. Looking at it now, it's a bad idea to have all that information in one place, no?

There was a P2P Reddit alternative some time ago. The problem with it was that you had to install a program on your computer, so it can sync with the network. I doubt it still exists, but the idea was intriguing. Anyone remember the name?

4chan? It doesn't touch the scale and breadth of Reddit and I was always a little uncomfortable the handful of times I visited. Maybe because of no-rules /b/ but there are definitely some wholesome boards out there.

Not entirely related but a few years ago I started a side project with the aim of teaching myself a few new tools, and solving some of the biggest issues I had with reddit. [1]

Since then, reddit has addressed a lot of these themselves (crossposting, submitting text and link together) but in quite a bolted-on way.

I would love to see a site that rather than just being a reddit clone, takes all of the lessons learnt from reddit over the years as a base and better enables these communities and discussions.

[1] https://github.com/kraftman/TenTags.io

If we go to yet another corporate/tech bros entity, we're stupid.

Let's build our communities right this time and select something open-source, and federated so we don't end up in the same place in another 10 years.

Are there any other good sites that also have cascading comments like reddit and this site? I've realized that it's the best format for reading discussion for me. Any flat structure just won't cut it.

I'd like to see an alternative Vanguard-style (the investment group) owned by the people for the people. I wonder what that would look like? E.g. socialize the hosting costs and take votes on new policies.

You might be interested to a look at hawker.social. It combines reddit with features of Patreon (subscriptions) and discord (sub channel). You can also use it as a substack style publication!

90% of the time there's a forum for the subject that's a better option anyway. For example, the College Football /r/cfb area is periodically entertaining but the Rivals.com network is significantly better for the same thing anyway.

I found that blocking Reddit as part of the parental controls on my home network was beneficial anyway, considering just how much stuff falls under the umbrella of availability on that site.

As a news aggregator it always felt untrustworthy and slanted anyway.

There's nothing I miss about having it blocked.

Come back to MySpace, we will welcome you with open arms. But I can't let you edit the raw html anymore. The blink tags were too much.

I’ve seen https://tildes.net/ pop up but it’s invite only atm I think, would totally be down for an invite from anyone here though :)

What do you use Reddit for? The answer is going to be subject-matter dependent.

For me, Discord has already replaced 95% of my Reddit use -- and not because I'm anti-Reddit, but just because community activity has migrated to Discord naturally. The remainder of my Reddit use is mostly "a search engine sent me there."

Subreddits related to development and programming tried to create programming.dev, which is a federated alternative, but the registering is failing for some reason, possibly because of too many accounts being generated. Anyways aside from that it has good content.

Reddit is complete garbage, also influenced by GOV.... just as much as FB if not more. I stopped using when I got banned for politely asking the medical community about why my ears were (and still are) ringing from the J&J shot.

There may be alternatives to specific subreddits, but there is no Reddit alternative. There is only one macro network like Reddit, and that is Reddit. Maybe that network effect breaks, but I doubt that happens because of this.

https://sic.pm/ is an interesting project by epilys I have saved but the code seems to have been removed from GitHub.

I've been using Lemmy and I've been pretty satisfied with it.

Interestingly, one of the largest started as https://patriots.win/ which was created in the wake of the notorious the_donald subreddit's quarantine and ban. Top posts still get 50-200 comments and 1000+ upvotes, and it seems to have fairly high volume with hundreds of new posts per day.

They branched out to become a general reddit-like alternative with other supposedly neutral and separately moderated subs, but the other ones have far lower activity levels - see their version of /all: https://communities.win/

kbon.social is the only one I've seen that looks and quacks like a reddit-esque duck, albeit a "store's own brand" version

Did you ever hear of groups.google.com? About 30Y older than reddit, the original Usenet groups system started in the late 70s ...

Why don't we all just chuck a post in a gist and use the comments to chat?

It doesn't have the hyper-local capabilities that reddit has but metafilter.com deserves a shoutout. It has an established community, has been around for _ages_ and is a good replacement for /r/all and the like.

For tech issues, I recommend stackexchange and the various gpt-based products that repackage it. Phind.com is pretty good, but they're move back to gpt 3.5 has really neutered the quality of answers.

For general discussion, there is no alternative, and reddit was not an option even before today. I was active on two non-tech subreddits: /r/judaism and /r/buttcoin. I am a classical liberal politically, but I am also an Orthodox Jew. I was banned across several accounts for respectfully stating Jewish beliefs in /r/Judaism and for saying that hating Jews isn't acceptable "anti-zionism" in /r/buttcoin. (I'm an anti-zionist, and my statement that hating Jews isn't ok led to a ban from the subreddit for "defending Zionist agression" or something equally absurd.)

I've seen media become more polarized in the last ten years or so. There is little left and right discussion. There are places where left is OK and anything else is fascism, which is ok to ban. On the other side, there are conspiracy theories, and anything else is lies by communist pedophiles and groomers to discredit great patriots. (I guess I'm a fascist and a communist because I believe Trump is a criminal and men can't get pregnant.) HN stays pretty clean by avoiding politics, but if you're looking for good political discussion, please make your own site. I'll help with the infrastructure, and maybe some good discussion will come of it.

More specifically, does anybody have a suggestion for an alternative to the /r/worldnews subreddit?

Many niche topics I have an interest in are still better represented by standalone forums, I have found.

The site:reddit.com search modifier is very useful. You are just missing the minus ;)

This question pops every time there is crisis on reddit, reality is - there is none.

HN has been timing out, oof. Too much redirected traffic I guess

I set up a Lemmy account yesterday. It has promise.

There are some listed here,

https://stackdiary.com/reddit-alternatives/

There is no a one for all alternative to Reddit. There are few promising tech as Lemmy or Kbin because they work with ActivityPub as Mastodon. What I have seen many don't like the free speech nature of ActivityPub and run away if they see a tech with an instance not of their liking.

But Reddit tipping point started because most of 3rd party clients are closing as Apollo, none of current alternatives have a good client as Reddit clients.

There are few centralized alternatives you can look up as Tildes, Lobsters and stacker news (focused on Bitcoin and Nostr).

Right now there is a vacuum, and who knows how that void will be filled, especially for niche and local communities.

At the moment, I'm shuffling my time in between these

* Tildes (tildes.net)

* Lemmy (join-lemmy.org)

* kbin (kbin.pub)

Another place I like for community stuff is Discord. Yeah it's an instant-messaging platform and its target demographic is mostly gamers, but you can likely find one related to your city, and they added a "forum" option where you can easily participate. But it's proprietary, so you never know when they'll pull the rug like Reddit did.

I suggest you take a look at raddle: https://raddle.me/

other subreddits. however reddit's search is so bad that nobody is going to find them

slahdot.org

headcycle.com - there are dozens of us, dozens!

to think ? walking and laying outside with a book

kbin.social

Here, lobste.rs, mailing lists, and 4chan

The other alternatives don't seem very viable

Lemmy

There’s always ChatGPT. Have it generate a perfect community for you!

just bunch try hard dickfarts intent on ruining things for everyone.

How about we take this opportunity to go back to the old internet to a time where real free speech ruled. Remember how reddit started off, where ANYTHING went no matter what (as long as it was legal)?

Do people have the courage for that anymore? I certainly do, and I'd love to hear from those who disagree in complete free speech for the next Reddit.