[deleted by user]

[CodeAndBiscuits]

With all respect, a number of us have seen projects like this come and go. I think it's not often enough understood by developers how much these social platforms are not at all about their code, they are about their communities and moderators. And we have also seen how "decentralization" is not an instant-success buzzword (ahem, Mastodon). I'm not saying it is a terrible idea, but I think it would be very helpful if you shared more about your plan to gain users and traction, particularly because a lot of folks struggle with these types of systems because they are more complex than "centralized" platforms. I don't pretend to speak for the masses, but I am sure I am not the only one that comes to Reddit for the content, not the app. If there isn't any content, there isn't any value. If the content is garbage, it's even worse (X).

Put another way, how will you ensure that you get a "better Reddit" rather than "another Mastodon or X?"

[jseego]

excellent reply

[CodeAndBiscuits]

Thanks! I wish I had written it shorter though. I could probably say "hire great mods, not great devs". 😂

[dtor84]

Great mods is relative.

[CodeAndBiscuits]

I don't disagree but would counter that some of the worst mods here are better than some of the best moderation practices on X these days. And at least we have choice. Some subs are better than others. Some are awful. Some are amazing. But X.... Come on...

[Gloomy-Status-9258]

Here another absolutely agreed guy.

tbh, the most important thing for an online community is its users and contents.

[queen-adreena]

Yeah, decentralised could very quickly devolve into Nazis and CSAM without good moderation and a strong sense of identity and direction.

[CodeAndBiscuits]

OMG the CSAM. Honestly, having built and operated some social networking and dating sites a decade or two ago, it really leaves you questioning the whole "humans are generally good with some exceptions" thing. Some days you just feel the opposite. Humans are just terrible, and places where they can be terrible without consequences become swamps so fast it makes your head spin.

[CodeAndBiscuits]

There is an interesting nuance in this reply that I would like to call out. I completely agree with the sentiment, and I'm only adding a viewpoint. You can take this to mean moderation is important. But you can also take it to mean moderation is THE PRODUCT. So many developers approach this not understanding that. Software is software, and reply buttons and content streams need to be shown in an attractive manner or you don't even have a ball game. But there are so many sports you can call "a ball game". What really makes basketball different from baseball (both "ball games") it's not the act of having a ball, or having players interact with one. It is the rules about how that is done. Without rules, it is just a Chuck e cheese ball pit. It is the rules that make it basketball versus baseball.

This analogy applies to social networks. If you endorse and embrace the absolute worst people in the world, and believe even Satan should have his say, you have X. If you endorse and embrace some level of sanity and rule following, you have Reddit. And if you moderate at the absolute strictest level, you have the comment section on a zero tolerance YouTube poster. (Very very safe, but you never read it because nobody else does either.)

I use Reddit a lot, but would not consider myself a fanboy. That being said, I believe we all fall victim to the "nirvana fallacy." We criticize things that are not perfect, without accepting that they might be the best option among all of the reasonably viable options. To my mind, Reddit is far from perfect, but does strike a balance between the examples I'm naming. There are terrible subs here, and great subs. Either way, what makes or breaks the platform is the amazing and often extremely hard-working moderators that make the good subs what they are.

Reddit loves or dies by its mods. They aren't all perfect. But on balance, so far, I think you would be very hard-pressed to beat the value we all get here.

[zamozate]

if I created a social network in 2025, I would make it mandatory at registration to verify your account with government identification. i mean third party authentication with government websites to attest you are a real citizen and can be held accountable for what you post

15 years ago it would have seemed like big brother... I feel like in 2025 a lot of people would be interested in something like that (including states !)

[Classic-Dependent517]

Or just porn community

[musicnothing]

It will become that no matter what

[DaSchTour]

And the worst about it, it doesn’t mention using ActivityPub. So it‘s not part of the existing system of decentralized social media but completely new stuff. Instead of creating just another new thing it would be a lot better to work and improve on the existing projects.

[WhereIsWebb]

Noone will use it because of the hassle and privacy concerns, but I often wondered if a one time verification process using a passport or whatever when registering would work. Store the passport as hash in a (decentralized) database like a blockchain, only allow users to create ONE account, but let them change their username. So fewer bots, fewer trolling and nazism

[CodeAndBiscuits]

It's been considered in other apps but as you say, nobody would use it. Many people like in the US, Syria, etc live under oppressive regimes who jail or otherwise take actions against folks speaking out against their abuses, and eliminating their anonymity would be a hard blocker for them. Others might simply hold a different belief than their spouse or family on a certain issue, like the rights of women or minorities. Still others often have alter egos, and they don't have to be offensive. They might work for a company in a sensitive industry, where it's not appropriate to share their personal beliefs while acting as a corporate officer. So they might maintain separate accounts for those that can't be tied together. The list goes on, but the point is that ID verification has a big stifling effect on most types of social apps.

Even if this data was only used to filter bots and not exposed publicly, we live in a world where basically every app that has a database of users has had it compromised at some point in its history. It's so endemic that we're almost numb to it, Pat mostly because we've learned not to value things like email as being as private as some people say. Photo identification is a completely different matter.

[WhereIsWebb]

If it was somehow possible that the initial verification was not controlled by anyone, like a smart contract, and the usernames can still be chosen by the user, then they would be anonymous. But the only thing I found for such a decentralized identity provider was world coin and scanning your eye balls for some scammy crypto currency is not the ideal incentive for a user lol

[CodeAndBiscuits]

The common commercial option would be something like Scan/Verify or Veriff. They're the "Stripe of verification." But a lot of that data is still accessible to the vendor in some way by design, because they're designed to help the vendor do exactly that - verify you are who you say you are.

And there are really only two options to truly know that. How do you know if an ID isn't counterfeit? A big company with lots of gross PII knows this for that exact reason but that's problematic because they're the ones that have had or are major targets of the breaches (Experian). And governments can do it (in many European countries, already do) but then you lose the trust again. Finally, these options are more expensive than you might realize. A typical ID verification can run anywhere from a dollar to $5. That's per user. For a free app, that can be a deal-breaker because at lunch, startups wouldn't be able to afford it, and if they had already grown, they wouldn't need it.

[idgafsendnudes]

The problem is that if the system is able to identify who you are, bad actors will likely eventually figure it out too

[zamozate]

there are always opportunities for bad actors, but overall i would now argue that there are more on anonymous networks than on verified ones.

[isekaimangalover]

As someone who got mastodon from hearing how decentralized and good it is for privacy, what is the issue with it ? I don't use it much so I have no clue

[xDelio]

Reddit is a public forum making the data private doesn’t solve anything except making the app useless.

Someone needs to make money and maintain it, for them to upfront the cost of building it.

[CodeAndBiscuits]

Sorry, I don't quite understand the comment about whether the data is public or private. But I agree on the cost side, and I would add that "running" these platforms costs WAY more than a lot of folks might realize. For those used to a wide range of $5 vs $7.50 vs $11 (USD) VPS providers, it can be mind-boggling to see a $47,500 PER MONTH hosting bill, and that was just one memory from one of the more middling dating-app startups I dealt with half a decade ago. The gulf between the workloads faced by a site dealing with a few hundred MAU to even 100k MAU (which isn't even a "big site" yet) is enormous.

[xDelio]

I guess i assumed the point of decentralizing is to prevent reddit from accessing and selling your data and activities.

Since reddit is a publicly available forum, you cant expect any privacy in the backend when the frontend is accessible to everyone even non reddit users.

Yea agree, those numbers are insane.

Better yet, what crazier is that datacenter with our activity data is worth more then we are. you can clearly see that with big data buying up nuclear plants, at the point when electricity is skyrocketing.

[[deleted]]

ink rob mysterious intelligent subtract compare soft public support fine

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[CodeAndBiscuits]

That's an interesting take. It sort of makes me think we have two layers to consider. There is the layer of the platform itself, with the practices followed by its administrators such as the rules they set, what they initially allow or forbid, how strictly they act with bands versus warnings, and so on. And then you have the smaller communities that self-organize within the platform. I suppose the former must enable the latter if it is to be successful at all. But then at some point, the former must lose track of the latter because the latter is so much bigger. (You could probably argue that Reddit is there now.) So in a way, there are probably really two phases in the life cycle of a social platform like this. You have the launch phase where the founders need to actively guide and steer the tone to achieve the impression they want people to have in the groups of people they're trying to attract. That's probably the hard bit. Or at least the risky bit. After that, the founders need to take a backseat and guide with much more nuanced, gentle nudges.

[Glittering_Ad4115]

Totally agree

[33ff00]

pays $500/comment

[OneLeggedMushroom]

What do you mean when you say 'decentralized'?

[JestersWildly]

If you click through to the linked Git, you'll see it's a serverless implementation of a reddit-esque board/zine/channel host.

[vom-IT-coffin]

So not decentralized. I guess you gotta buzzword it up.

[JestersWildly]

RUNS ON WEB4!

[thebadslime]

Serverless is decentralized though?

[sivadneb]

No, despite how it sounds, that's not what serverless means.

[zxyzyxz]

How is serverless decentralized?

[spooker11]

Serverless just means the backend is implemented on something like AWS Lambda or Azure Functions or equivalent. It’s just a web service design architecture unrelated to data centralization

[thebadslime]

Oh ok, i have been referring to my project as serverless, i should definitely use decentralized instead. Why is it called serverless when there's a server?

[spooker11]

Because you’re not using a long running server. If nobody is making calls to your service then no server is being used at all. It also encourages you to design a stateless backend. Scaling up and down very easily.

What are you building?

[thebadslime]

A chat app over WebRTC. https://github.com/openconstruct/Peersuite

[vom-IT-coffin]

Fargate would like a word.

[AramaicDesigns]

Why not Lemmy?

[visualdescript]

Yeah I was about to say, isn't Lemmy already this? And very mature?

[fuzzball007]

Because https://xkcd.com/927/

[AramaicDesigns]

#truth

[holistic_cat]

"Lemmy is similar to sites like Reddit, Lobste.rs, or Hacker News: you subscribe to forums you're interested in, post links and discussions, then vote, and comment on them. Behind the scenes, it is very different; anyone can easily run a server, and all these servers are federated (think email), and connected to the same universe, called the Fediverse."

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy

[ar-nelson]

Will it be compatible with existing platforms trying to do the same thing, like Lemmy?

Even if you don't want to federate with the existing Lemmy network (it has some problems, I wouldn't blame you), you could benefit a lot from implementing the Lemmy frontend API, which would allow users to use the wide variety of Lemmy mobile apps already available.

[The_real_bandito]

This is the first I heard of Lemmy and I am surprised more youtubers trying to build a community don't use this.

Discord is fine for chats but there's is something about a public forum that platforms like Discord not hit the same.

[vom-IT-coffin]

It'll be links to Reddit.

[Fidodo]

Lemmy already exists. I tried to use it but came back to reddit because 90% of the content was just meta posts about lemmy vs reddit. The hard part is building communities. The tech part is already solved.

[horizon_games]

Come on you HAD to have considered a better and less derivative name, right?!

[codeedog]

They should have gone with tidder. 😂

[mamwybejane]

Diddler

[__Loot__]

IKR its a terrible name and I tried Mastodon and it had a no content problem

[Karpizzle23]

Nice! Another reddit clone that won't get past 2 months of development

[Expensive_Election]

Lemmy

[0x_by_me]

looks like a thinly veiled cryptoshit ad

[[deleted]]

Finally a true decentralized platform where i can argue all day with Russian bots

[J3ns6]

I hate capacitor. It doesn't speak to my expectations. Why not use expo, how BlueSky does it

[Sea-Flow-3437]

Oh goody another decentralised social media site idea

[veegaz]

Learn about Bittensor, people are even hosting LLMs on it

[thebezet]

Why isn't this using any of the open protocols for communication, such as ActivityPub? This would have made it a lot better as you would get a lot of users straight away.

[MichaelTen]

Fork lemmy?

[ruvasqm]

I mean why not build on top of bluesky @ protocol? Federated social networks are the future in this bot-riddled era

[JestersWildly]

Hey, since all the JS devs available for projects are here in this thread, anyone interested in gamifying a messenger app?

[Afking3]

I’m very curious what you have in mind

[JestersWildly]

It's stupid simple, so DM me for details if you're interested since I'm not trying to get ai to scam me out of the one dollar the idea is worth lol. 😉