alt Hacker NewsThis is a little premature - I'm about a month away from a really good launch date, but the sentiment here is too good a match to miss...
A long time ago, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, I set up my first webserver. In those halcyon days you had to email CERN to get your website added to the list of websites in the world; a list people downloaded as the sum total of what the web was and where they could visit.
Things have come a long way since then, but maybe not always for the better. The ad-companies have wormed their way into just about everything on the web, and the tech billionaires have funded it because they can make even more money at the general public's expense.
I recently got very fed up with Reddit's anti-user policies, and decided 'screw it, there's not that much special here'. As a result, Blewit[1] came into existence: it's an experiment - can an old-style just-for-the-good-of-the-community-it-represents website still function in today's modern world? We'll see...
Blewit takes no user information other than a username/password. We're forced to accept cloudflare's country-code so we can be compliant with the Online Safety Act, but we deliberately don't even ask for an email address.
We don't track. We don't have ads that are other ways to track. We don't have algorithms that force engagement along the most-outrageous pathway. We don't have analytics to sell you stuff. We don't put tracking pixels in our site, and when you upload an image, we strip it of all the EXIF/Location data so it can't be used to track you by proxy.
More bluntly, all the dark patterns are missing. By design. It hearkens back to a simpler time, where people did things simply because they thought it was cool, and others might like it too.
So it'll be interesting to see if something like Reddit (I think it's better, but I'm biased) can survive in the far-more-predatory world that we live in, than when I first started using the web. The site is deliberately lean-and-mean, and I think I can give it the on-ramp it needs to become successful if it gets the engagement of sufficient people. Again, I guess we'll see :)
Enjoy.
You call it a "Reddit alternative" but that's not really how the world works. People don't go out looking for Reddit-like sites, stumble across Reddit and sign up. People are just going about their business, find Reddit, and eventually feel pressured to sign up so they can post, comment or vote. The funnel starts with people stumbling across engagement-worthy content on your site, which only exists and is findable if it exists and is findable.