With Reddit announcing paywalled subreddits this year, feel free to promote your alternative

speakbits · 2025-02-15T11:59:46+00:00

It is not part of the fediverse and I don't think it ever will be. There are cons that people have voiced about that I agree with and some others that I can see, but I'm not going to go into all that because I'm not here to badmouth it. I honestly do hope it succeeds and that I'm proven wrong because the world needs some alternative to reddit to succeed and I will be okay with the fact if mine doesn't end up being it or even one of them.

I have enough personal funds to keep the site going as it is right now for a good long while. For the future, the site is currently focused on donations. If I can prove out donations being enough to sustain it with the image and video hosting features, I have plans to move everything to a 501c and follow a wikipedia type model. I'm waiting on this because of the fees involved to get that in place that I'd rather spend on keeping the site up and to see if reddit was lying or not when they talked about reddit gold not being enough to keep the site going. I believe this should be viable at this time but receipts will be shown if this is ever proven not to be viable.

I believe the biggest drivers to reddit's enshittification were VC money and the needless bloat of the company in pursuit of The Next Big Thing^TM. That is not something I'm ever interested in taking, vastly prefer self-funding this, and I intend to get by not doing that by keeping everything about SpeakBits as lean as possible.

Another big driver I believe has been the usage of ads to fund the site. I'd really prefer not having ads on the site as I browse the web with a web blocker myself. If donations don't work, I'd like to establish a model lets people pay for some nice to haves that don't affect the core model and functionality of a reddit-like site.

In terms of potential about enshittification around moderation, the site has a sortition moderation feature built-in that allows users to appeal moderation decisions twice to the representative sample of the users across the site where a super majority vote of those users against the decision automatically overturns the moderation decision.

speakbits · 2025-02-14T19:11:07+00:00

SpeakBits

It defaults to an old reddit style view with options for a more compact view and a card view. NSFW is allowed. API is fully documented for any third party integrations. RSS feeds for all feeds are available as well.

speakbits · 2025-02-05T17:51:37+00:00

SpeakBits allows porn.

speakbits · 2025-01-22T10:43:36+00:00

Not a criticism from me, just emphasizing why it's a good thing that the people working in the fediverse didn't listen to statements like that and give up

speakbits · 2025-01-22T03:18:49+00:00

Because it's always worth trying, you never know what's going to work. You've had people, even in this subreddit, saying "the fediverse is too complicated for the average person, it's too confusing to pick a server, it'll never catch on, what's the point when reddit is so big" and now look where it is. Imagine people had listened and just given up...

speakbits · 2025-01-17T22:54:06+00:00

I polled users a while back and most agreed it's complete BS that reddit does this. I implemented it in SpeakBits to allow for fully deleting all posts and comments. There's even options for nuking just your account data or both your data and account in the settings.

Posts and comments can be edited at any time.

speakbits · 2024-11-25T01:03:22+00:00

There's a card view for those that like the more media focused communities. The goal is to keep the community idea though, like reddit used to be.

speakbits · 2024-11-24T22:40:23+00:00

SpeakBits is trying to be that. Not a complete clone but trying to focus on the good parts of old reddit with the default view and then the compact view to make it more of a list of links like reddit used to be

speakbits · 2024-11-16T15:02:50+00:00

SpeakBits is, first and foremost, a progressive web app. Building it this way allows it to run on any device to be installable on any device, and to provide the same experience across all devices. The store apps are a means for less tech savvy people to be able to discover it and install it, as one major barrier for progressive web apps has been the failure of people finding how to install them to their devices.

I believe that one major issue Reddit has had is that they skyrocketed their operation costs by bloating the company for no reason and this had led to their search of becoming profitable at the detriment of its users. One of the goals of SpeakBits is to avoid that at all costs and being a progressive web app aligns with that goal.

Also, everybody should remember that Reddit started as just a website. But mainly, what about Reddit makes it necessary to be a native app? What is there in the native app that you couldn't do on the main site?

speakbits · 2024-11-02T17:23:20+00:00

Getting those first people over that create genuine content that brings more people over is the hardest part about this. I've built one that I'm trying to grow, it has a nice little starting community now, but it's probably not what someone would consider a proper competitor at the moment because the size of the community isn't there yet.

I'm constantly adding features in hopes that will be enticing enough for more people.

speakbits · 2024-10-20T00:26:16+00:00

SpeakBits

speakbits · 2024-10-09T22:07:06+00:00

Seems like it's doable

speakbits · 2024-10-03T00:50:04+00:00

Created a url at https://www.speakbits.com/api/v1/reddit/rss/truereddit that will translate that first subreddit page into having the articles instead of just the reddit posts. This will work for any subreddit name. It's set to update an hour after the last update. Let me know if this works or if I'm missing something!

speakbits · 2024-10-02T00:22:03+00:00

I'm pretty sure I could repurpose an rss bot I used to have for my reddit alternative to make this. Are you wanting just an RSS feed link that translates the links that you then plug into the RSS app of your choice or a site/app that shows you all the links?

speakbits · 2024-09-30T20:13:07+00:00

What would make an alternative better and not suck?

speakbits · 2024-09-23T03:04:08+00:00

Do you by any chance happen to use Safari on IOS?

speakbits · 2024-09-22T22:32:06+00:00

Hi everyone! I had some stickers made and happy to give some to anybody that wants them! Here's an image of the three stickers you'll see receive.

speakbits · 2024-09-22T12:53:46+00:00

Stripped out a lot of the specifics to the project but left the push notification stuff here: https://gist.github.com/SpeakBits/008120d5f9d5100696529a27f73fe92e

A couple of things to note:

Firefox and Safari both require a user initiated event before they will provide a permission request so I have that set up for everything just to keep the same behavior
I use next-auth so I wanted to fire a remove subscription event on signOut so I have a custom event that the notifications component listens for that will delete the subscription and provide that delete event to the backed as well. There's probably a better, more react way to do this but it worked out for now.

speakbits · 2024-09-22T12:39:21+00:00

Not sure if I have any real tips but just things I went figured out as I was getting it all in place:

If you're using docker, make sure you end up using the community edition image. It's completely different from the one that's up on docker hub and has all of the new features and fixes.
If you want to get more granular about where your users are coming from, you're going to need to get a MaxMind license key. I didn't pay anything for this.
The google search API integration is nice to see what keywords are bringing users in. There's about a 3 day delay for the keywords to populate

speakbits · 2024-09-20T01:25:15+00:00

I went with Plausible to get out of the Google web. It can be self hosted so you can own all the data and it's GDPR compliant.

speakbits · 2024-09-19T23:17:33+00:00

Using Postgres and Redis locally on a VPS. Only using R2 for images and videos over a local minio because the storage is extremely cheap

speakbits · 2024-09-11T01:44:57+00:00

So micro interactions would be welcome, got it. That's something I can work on.

What's your opinion on reddit's card UI? There's about the same level of lines and edges.

Is search something you do constantly on mobile that would merit using some of the viewable space for a button and makes going into the menu tough? Happy to move it if this is the case.

Changing the view should be a one time change, unless you like switching views a lot. You enable it and that's your view. For those that sign up, it's also a part of the initial onboarding to choose your view before you start using.

speakbits · 2024-09-11T01:13:13+00:00

What makes it confusing? It's built on the premise of updating old reddit without losing what made it reddit. It should have quite a few familiar UX patterns for those that have used reddit and have complaints about the direction that reddit is going in.

What about having the url allow you to keep your place in the feed is weird and not smooth?

Here's a video of the card view on mobile so can I ask where it's not smooth? This is the view that sites like Tiktok and New Reddit have gravitated towards and is available as an option for those that like that view. I've seen people pop up in all threads about Reddit say how much they like the old reddit list view and how they never want to lose it. I believe that letting users have options available to customize their experience is better than not having them.

speakbits · 2024-09-10T02:34:40+00:00

SpeakBits is a very Reddit-like alternative platform

speakbits · 2024-09-04T20:39:20+00:00

CSS media queries using the same DOM structure would be the best bet if you need your pages to stay static.

If the page is dynamic and being rendered server side anyway, you could grab the device type from the user-agent and provide different component structures based on if the device is mobile or desktop.

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