Personally I think the best alternatives are what we’ve already been using: discourse, Matrix, Mastodon, Zulip, Github Issues, and community forums.
For finding new interesting content, I strongly believe that instead of creating a new platform someone should create a “hub”: a centralized aggregator which presents all of these platforms in a consistent format. A place where you can find various forums and Zulip / Mastodon instances, get a feed of their posts, and even create accounts and make posts/comments; but it doesn’t host the instances or posts themselves, it just uses their APIs. It can also host some of the archived / scraped data from SE and Reddit for consistency. The reasons being:
- The platforms I mention already exist for many communities, and there’s already a lot of difficulty in finding content. This has been a good idea way before platforms started closing off their content
- Creating a fully-centralized platform is actually way harder than creating a decentralized one. At the same time, it’s very important that whatever platform we use is easy for newcomers, easy to find content, and fast; all properties of centralized servers. Hence, the centralized entry-point and hub but decentralized instances works well.
- Mastodon has a centralized hub but tbh it sucks. Discourse, Matrix, Zulip, etc. have none. And of course there’s no hub which supports all of these platforms together.
- I’ve only heard bad things about Lemmy and the UI is crap.
I would absolutely love to help such a project but, like many unfortunately, don’t have the time or networking ability to start it myself. But if I see a Show HN or something similar which seems like it’s actually getting momentum I will try to contribute
Interesting idea. In a sense this is also kind of "decentralized" in terms of hosting because you are just using the APIs, and the service itself will just be provided via a client managing the credentials. But I don't quite understand how this will be so different from Matrix has been doing. Basically, the application is just a centralized hub with bridge to different communities. Wouldn't this just be a "yet another standard" situation?
What makes this approach really stand out is that, even if there are 5 different aggregators, it doesn't matter, because they're all aggregating the same data. And even if someone decides to use one of the existing platforms (e.g. discourse), posts/comments from this aggregator to the platform still show up. So this is actually a way to alleviate the "yet another standard" issue (though I acknowledge it won't be as good as a single common instance, due to different formats).
I think that you go to the site hub, you should immediately see a feed of curated popular posts and a "Create Account" form, similar to https://reddit.com/r/all, along with a search bar and list of filters. And when you create an account, you choose some suggestions and get presented with various communities, also like Reddit. Most people are barely even going to try your site, if you want them to join and put real effort into contributing you need to present good content as fast as possible.
Another issue with Matrix is that a lot of content just isn't on Matrix. As well as Reddit and other existing communities. For example, Rust has a subreddit, discourse, Matrix forum, and Zulip, and probably a discord somewhere too. There should really be a single platform where I can see posts from all of this, because I'm definitely not going to be checking each one individually.
I created a read-only version of something like this[1] to view discussions across subs/hn/lobsters/tildes/substack for any given link. I really like the idea of what you're suggesting.
For finding new interesting content, I strongly believe that instead of creating a new platform someone should create a “hub”: a centralized aggregator which presents all of these platforms in a consistent format. A place where you can find various forums and Zulip / Mastodon instances, get a feed of their posts, and even create accounts and make posts/comments; but it doesn’t host the instances or posts themselves, it just uses their APIs. It can also host some of the archived / scraped data from SE and Reddit for consistency. The reasons being:
- The platforms I mention already exist for many communities, and there’s already a lot of difficulty in finding content. This has been a good idea way before platforms started closing off their content
- Creating a fully-centralized platform is actually way harder than creating a decentralized one. At the same time, it’s very important that whatever platform we use is easy for newcomers, easy to find content, and fast; all properties of centralized servers. Hence, the centralized entry-point and hub but decentralized instances works well.
- Mastodon has a centralized hub but tbh it sucks. Discourse, Matrix, Zulip, etc. have none. And of course there’s no hub which supports all of these platforms together.
- I’ve only heard bad things about Lemmy and the UI is crap.
I would absolutely love to help such a project but, like many unfortunately, don’t have the time or networking ability to start it myself. But if I see a Show HN or something similar which seems like it’s actually getting momentum I will try to contribute