https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy It would need a lot of adjustments and ways to prevent community corruption but It could work. I do wonder how this could work for free speech. Maybe "deletion" could work throgh reporting, if at least a quarter of the community reports with the same reason, it could get passed on to moderation, with transparent mod logs? So a democracy with democratically elected representatives (moderators in a way) of decent enough power to nudge the subreddit in the right way, but not authoritarian control. When I looked back at this post, perhaps it could be like US democracy, but tbh probably minarchy.

I might experiment with that concept, dunno. Share more ideas.

Hi, I'm considering Lemmy but want to know the answer to this question first. The primary reason I want to move is that a sub was banned on reddit unfairly and all the contents cannot be accessed anymore. I know that Lemmy has many instances, so I'm wondering if a sub gets banned on one instances can people still access its archived contents from other instances. I think it's a key feature in the fight against censorship. I have read the docs but couldn't find the answer. Thanks in advance.

Most reddit subs are very left oriented, and if they gets an idea that you are not a part of the hive mind you can end up with a ban.

Are there any lesser left wing, or even better, neutral boards out there?

I just joined it a few days ago.

As above...

Also, what strategies did you implement to ensure that you were able to get over the hurdle of attracting users who would then keep coming back and ensure to make your site a community hub?

I need help finding alternatives to these subreddits because their automods seem to be effin broken

Hey Redditers, Mike from Fan Clubs here with an exciting update!

I finished rolling out the UX/UI update that I talked about in my last post, which is the first major step before I start pushing for more growth. I'm taking a bit of a different approach than most alternatives, which I'll share here, as well as what to expect.

• Primary Topics are gaming, sports, entertainment, technology, and content creators, which all have general discussion forums.
• Clubs can be created for specific communities around fandoms such as your favorite sports team, console, game franchise, or content creators.
• An Innovative Tagging System that brings all communities together, increasing visibility across the whole community. A few tag examples being Watch Parties and Game Chats.
• The Rules are simple for now. Be respectful to others and leave politics out of it. Use common sense. Not everyone will agree on everything and that's okay. There's also an ignore feature for those who need it.
• There are still a few bugs, although most I've encountered only affect pre-existing content such as old images, embeds, and articles from before the update. They'll continue to get squashed over time.

Added context about the “leave politics out of it” quote

Politics will come up, but it is not going to be a core part of the community and it's not an area I'm interested in expanding into as a main point of discussion. If something comes up naturally or if there's a story worth sharing, it's not a problem. It just needs to stay civil.

Voat failed at the end of 2020 because its owners could not afford to pay their $6600/month hosting bills. Cohost failed this year because it had four employees who all expected to be paid living wages for running a site with only 30,000 active users and 3,000 paying users. While nothing is wrong with being paid, people running an ethical social media site that doesn't advertise or collect users' data must understand the importance of economics. This type of site must be run with as little overhead as possible. This means any such site should:

1. Be text only. Cat pictures and videos, as fun as they are, increase the hosting costs by a factor of about 100. This requires users to understand that if they want the site to survive and are not willing to pay to support it, they must lower their expectations.
2. Be self-hosted outside the cloud where expenses are lower and can be better controlled as growth occurs. This also increases the level of privacy that can be extended to users.
3. Not be funded by investors or investment banking money. These groups could not care less about providing high-quality social media. They care only about money, and once they realize they will not be making any on a project, they withdraw, leaving the people running the site without a source of income with which to pay their hosting bills.
4. Be run by volunteers in their spare time when they are not being paid.
5. Be run by people who care about providing users with privacy and anonymity and about fostering the growth of good communities that reject advertisers and influencers in favor of average users. (At least Cohost did this right.)
6. Allow free speech while blocking name calling, intimidation, and harassment. No, they are not the same thing.
7. Not be allowed to grow larger than the largest size that can be supported with whatever reliable income the site manages to attain--whether provided out of the owners' own pockets, users donations, or both.

I am sure many Redditors will disagree with the above principles. I challenge them to create their own social media sites their own way and see how long they survive.

Edit: Forgot to add Blue Dwarf's URL, so you can see for yourself that it isn't a home for nazis: https://bluedwarf.top

a few ones i posted in have this message

I've only tried Lemmy.world, any other good instances?

Good Morning everyone,
We launched ClubsAll on producthunt today. Your support and vote will be appreciated.
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/clubsall-2

Checkout clubsall at https://clubsall.com

💡 What is ClubsAll?
Simply put, ClubsAll is Fediverse simplified and designed to resonate with the average Redditor. After a year of iterating, and pouring in significant effort and innovation to create something unique, we are here to share it with all of you.

❓ Why did we build it?
As long-time Reddit users ourselves, we noticed that many Redditors, including us, were growing frustrated as Reddit seemed to prioritize monetization over its community. It felt like the platform had strayed from the values that initially made it so compelling.

Over time, many Reddit alternatives emerged, some even gained traction, but none could attract meaningful Redditors. We listened, learned, and worked hard to address those gaps. Here’s what we’ve built so far.

🚀 Key Features

💸 No Venture Capital, No ‘Selling Out’
We have bootstrapped ClubsAll, self-funded it, and own 100% of it. By choosing not to raise external funding, we stay focused on the community, free from profit-driven pressures. ClubsAll will always prioritize its users. If we ever need funds to pay for operating costs, we can keep the platform self-sustaining without selling equity, through features like awards and tip jars.

🌐 Fediverse Integration
With Fediverse integration, you can view and interact with content from platforms like Lemmy and Kbin, building on the amazing work already done by the community.

🗣️ Live Comments
We’re particularly proud of our live pages, where you can watch comments flow in real-time as they’re posted. It’s a fun way to discover new posts, jump into discussions you relate with the most, and explore new clubs (clubs are like subreddits). No need to hop clubs, hop posts, scroll comments. Let us know if you find it fun and useful.

💬 Live Chat in Post Comments
Each post has the classic threaded view like Reddit, but we’ve added a chatbox experience for more fluid conversations. It feels more like chatting with others rather than just posting comments, making discussions feel more real-time or "alive."

🔎 Discover New Clubs
Ever wished there was an easier way to stumble upon interesting subreddits/clubs? Our "Discover" tab does just that. It shows content from clubs you haven’t subscribed to yet, making it easy to find new clubs and discussions.

👥 Multiple Accounts Under One Login
Redditors often use multiple accounts, each with separate logins for different purposes. We’ve embraced that idea. At ClubsAll, you can create multiple profiles under one login. Whether it’s one for family, another for hobbies, or a third for more private matters, switching profiles is easy. Just click on the ClubsAll logo in the top left, scroll to the bottom, and choose another profile.

🔗 Simplified Cross-Posting
We made cross-posting easier, especially for content that belongs in multiple clubs. You can tag up to three clubs per post, ensuring the discussions stay organized without overwhelming users.

🌍 Unifying Servers and Communities
Finding communities across servers in the Fediverse can be challenging. We’ve aggregated top communities from federated servers, so you can access everything in one place. For example, you’ll find content from both "kbin.social/m/Funny" and "lemmy.world/c/funny" at ClubsAll Funny.

💡 Economic viability
Keeping the platform financially sustainable was a top priority. While Reddit itself has struggled with profitability, we’ve managed to run ClubsAll at under $10 a month, thanks in part to Cloudflare. However, keep in mind that this only covers hosting and doesn’t account for ongoing development costs.

📅 What’s Next?
We’re working on mobile apps for Android and iOS.
Largely, Reddit and ClubsAll are only available in the English-speaking world today. We’re exploring a crazy AI-powered translation feature to make ClubsAll accessible to non-English speakers worldwide.

❓ Can ClubsAll be Open-Sourced?
We get asked this question many times. We’d love to open-source ClubsAll, but right now, we don’t have the resources. We need help from the community - committed developers who can review code, run security scans, address security issues and bugs, set up observability, and more. Once we are confident we have enough support and safety, we will be happy to open source it. In fact, we commit to open-sourcing it if we get sufficient community support to make it sustainably safe. If you're interested, please join our discord and message us.

🗨️ Join Us on Discord!
We’d love your help and feedback! Whether you want to share ideas, report bugs, help us, or chat, join us on Discord. That’s where our community hangs out. You can also submit feedback through our feedback form.

I'm tired of Reddit's pure toxicity. 2024 made reddit so goddarn toxic that using Twatter is an upgrade. All apps i tried are either dead, or just Discord. But i want something new, something better, something interesting...(and positive). I just want something that is still alive (at least 100k total users) and has a better environement. But i feel like im asking for too much. I just dont ever wanna return to this app,even though it's the only one on the list.

I'm working on a Reddit alternative with the following key features/differences:

• Every community will essentially have 3 tabs: Feed, Gallery, and Chat. Feed for all post types (including dicussions), Gallery for an enhanced browsing experience for image and video posts, and Chat as a place to hang out and... chat.
• User profiles will be more creator-oriented: you can highlight the things you want to share, add tabs of custom content, and essentially turn your user profile into a portfolio or mini personal website
• There will be a "founding" period where users who bring people to the platform and contribute quality posts will earn points that will entitle them to future revenue sharing, for a a period. The long-term goal is to create monetization systems for creators and contributors, such as ad revenue sharing, tipping, subscriptions, and aiding in product and services sales.

My top two names right now are Unpop and Cubbies (based in part on available domain names). Thoughts?

Reddit has become even more unsufferable then it was 5 years ago. I'm genuinely tired of how rampant fake-news, hate speech and censorship has become. Unintelligent discourse has become the norm on this site. It is completely normal now for some guy to debate you with sixty different fallacies and then disregard all peer reviewed research you show in favour of his own hypothesises. So basically any smarter Reddit Alternatives?

Looking For: Stringent Fake News Regulation, less mysogyny/Red pill tate/racist discourse, reduced censorship (anti ecochambers), less teenagers (preferably), scientific

Alternatives

I'm tired of my posts being auto-mod deleted because they didn't follow rule 11.4 of the subreddit. Or a Mod deciding that my post was too right or left wing or whatever. I want to be completely free to say whatever I want, even if others see it as absolute nonsense.

I don't know where to share this but this feels important so I'm posting this here.

Very recently (maybe less than a week ago), I noticed that on Reddit's mobile app, I started seeing posts with negative karma on my front page. At first, I thought it was a bug, but it’s become quite regular. What worries me now is that these 0-karma posts also appear on the desktop website (see picture below—there were other 0-karma posts as well).

For those wondering why they might intentionally do this: it's to create negative engagement and boost ad revenue. Much like Twitter, they want you to react, even get mad, so they can increase the visibility of ads.

I know people here are already anti-Reddit, but this is a dramatic event for me if Reddit's algorithm on my personal feed tries to push shit content just to rage bait, like twitter.

If you’ve noticed the same change, talk about it. It’s possible this is a test being limited to certain servers or users for now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

​

https://preview.redd.it/r8r6zyv6cjrd1.png?width=1015&format=png&auto=webp&s=c5913e58537e49e6a3ce99c38cc191da04705282

As someone who lives outside the US and has no interest in the tribal battle between the US political parties, I'm becoming really fed up of the sheer quantity of political posts on here. It's not as simple as blocking particular subs, as politics seems to bleed into pretty much every sub after a while. Are there any alternatives with a decent population which outright ban political discussion, and which aren't run by political zealots?

Edit: Thanks to u/matbonucci for pointing me to the Freaky Blinders extension for Firefox, which allows filtering out posts using keywords.

Mainchan is a reddit alternative that has all kinds of features that doesn't have, such as optional anonymous posting, a feed for users you follow, community emotes, comment images, etc. We also don't have ads plan to monetize through "private feeds".

I recently got accepted to the iOS App Store, however we need 20 closed beta testers for the Google Play Store due to their new policies.

I'd appreciate anyone willing to join the beta! Either DM me your email or leave it in the comments so that I can add you to the closed beta testers list, after which you can download the app here or here!

Thank you very much in advance to anyone willing to join! It really helps me out.

Hello everyone!

Today marks the one year anniversary of when SpeakBits launched! I consider the official launch the day I made the first post on Reddit announcing the site. It’s been quite a year of very active development and a few stumbles trying to get the platform going. Overall, it’s been really fun, I’m happy to see some growing activity on the site, and really excited for the years that come.

New Development Update

There’s been quite a few changes in the last two months since my last update so I figure I should highlight them here.

• New Logo - The site has operated without an official logo for most of the years so I figured it was time to finally have one!
• Domain pages - The links that appear on submitted Link posts can be clicked to take you to a domain page that shows you a feed of all posts associated with that domain that have been posted to all groups on the site. They can also be reached by going to one of the domain urls, such as https://www.speakbits.com/domain/engadget.com
• Improved keyboard navigation - I received feedback that the keyboard navigation was lacking so this has been drastically improved, including “Skip to main content” and “Skip to right sidebar” links.
• Onboarding screen for new users - All new users now receive an onboarding screen to help emphasize settings that can be changed, such as feed density and light/dark mode, along with choosing which groups they want to join. This can be skipped if desired.
• Link post titles auto populate - Valid links will now auto populate the title field in the post submission page
• Image Classification and Media Search - A dedicated media search has been added to the search page that lets users search through images and videos uploaded to the site. All images and video thumbnails are run through a classification model to add extra context to allow contextual search.
• Combined Moderation Page - Group moderators now get a dedicated “Moderator” page that combines all of the groups they are moderating into one place. Both posts and comments can be moderated from here and can be sorted by the usual options. Groups can also be filtered out to only view specific groups as well. Each post and comment will highlight if they have any reports and allow for viewing those reports.
• Username, Email, and Password can now be changed - The user settings page now provides options for changing your username, email, and password. Usernames can be changed once every 6 months.
• Emails Optional - Users can now be created without providing an email. An email can be provided in the settings page at any time. I received a few requests from reddit users about this one so hopefully this is a welcome change.
• Social Logins - To continue the theme of providing users with options, users can now sign up with either Google Sign In or Apple Sign In if that is easier for them. Usernames are auto generated when choosing this option and can be changed immediately in the user settings. After 30 days, these users then fall under the 6 month change rule.

Year in Review

Previous Updates

Like I said before, there has been a ton of development work done since that first post so I figured it would be worth listing out the new features here for anybody that might have missed the previous updates. On top of the following, there has been a ton of work fixing bugs and enhancing performance.

General

• Availability to install in the Play Store, App Store, and as a Progressive Web App
• Three feed densities (Card, Comfortable, and Compact)
• RSS and JSON feeds
• Fully documented API for any third party development
• Push notifications on all platforms
• New WYSIWYG editor with markdown view
• Collapsible sidebar
• Early bot detection mechanism to flag users that might be bots
• NSFW (18+) Alerts

Profiles

• About section
• Private saved posts and comments
• Private upvotes and downvotes
• Delete account
• Delete all data
• Direct image and video uploading to profile for shareable links

User Settings

• Block users from appearing in feed and search
• Block groups from appearing in feeds and search
• Allow hiding all NSFW content from feed and search
• Allow changing default page that opens on load
• Allow changing default sort for group feed and comments
• Allow card feed to change from one column to three

Posts

• Multi image uploads and gallery view
• Cross site tagging of users with “@” and groups with “g/”
• Spoiler tags with “>||”
• Crossposts
• Inlined images and videos
• Zoomable images
• Poll post type
• Auto generated article summaries

Comments

• Image and video support in comments

Groups

• Allowing restrictions on what users can post to groups
• Banner images
• About group pages
• Public moderation logs
• Multi-group collections, e.g. https://www.speakbits.com/group/technology+news+fashion+sports
• Wiki pages

Moderation

• Post/comment locking
• Temporary bans from groups
• User blocking
• Automatic CSAM scanning and reporting
• Required removal reasons
• Sortition moderation and appeal system

Mistakes made and lessons learned

Early on, I made an assumption that initial users would want to have something to look at on the site to use it. I had some curated RSS feeds that would populate the first groups every day for the six months. These were explicitly labeled as a bot, in both the username and a tag, because transparency is a fundamental part of SpeakBits. It wasn’t until April that I received some feedback about how much users hated having these pop up all the time so I completely removed it.

Looking back on how this year has gone, I can firmly say this was a critical mistake that really hampered the initial traction on the site. Removing the automated posts led to a drastic change in user activity and is one of the best changes I could have made. I’m hoping this next year can go much better while I continue to add more features and fixes to the site.

Another mistake I feel I made early on was only having the development and production builds, which led to bugs making it through to users attempting to use the site when things would work through all my testing but fail for one reason or another in production. There have also been massive UI changes since launch that might have been a little jarring. Here is a comparison pic that shows Today > Jan 2024 > Launch. I’ve since introduced a beta UI at beta.speakbits.com that receives new UI features before it makes it to the main site and apps so that there’s a bit more testing time with external users along with more time to get used to them.

Future

All in all, I’m hopeful for the future of SpeakBits and I really think it could be the place for a lot of people. More features and refinements are planned and coming in this next year so I hope everyone here checks it out and gives it a shot!

As always, I’m happy to hear any feedback from anyone! This platform is nothing without its users and I’m interested in hearing how I can make this a platform that any of you will want to join and help grow.

Comments can also be left on the companion post here.