While logged in on Reddit, go to this page: https://old.reddit.com/subreddits, then copy the url from the "multireddit of your subscriptions" link in the sidebar to the right, replace the "old.reddit.com" in it with "teddit.net", and bookmark that.
You can just send me an email to the address in the announcement blog post, and I can give you an invite: https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes (that offer's open to anyone, but please read through the post so you know about the site's goals/principles/etc.)
It's not intended to be difficult to get an invite, I mostly just don't want to constantly deal with large influxes of users because of drama on other sites, persistent trolls, and things like that.
It doesn't show by default to logged-out users, but we've got a devoted group set up for Advent of Code that's reasonably active so far, if anyone's participating in that and would like to join us: https://tildes.net/~comp.advent_of_code
One of the bots in /r/SubredditSimulator was the "top today" bot, which would just take the top 500 posts from /r/all in the last 24 hours, pick one of the links at random, and repost it with a gibberish title made from a markov chain of those 500 posts' titles. With such a small set of input, the titles almost never made any sense at all.
I had to shut that bot down, because eventually just reposting a random popular meme/image from the last 24 hours with a nonsensical title started becoming far too successful and it ended up getting 2,648,254 post karma, while often getting its own posts near the top of /r/all: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditSimMeta/comments/c5besk/th...
I wouldn't consider it particularly elegant, but it's straightforward and has worked well. It uses the "complete.ic" event to trigger whenever an intercooler request finishes, and then uses the response status/code/text to display an appropriate message.
This might come off as a little rude, but it's sincere advice from someone who used to work in anti-spam (not at Facebook):
I had a quick look through Dreamwidth's "latest" page (https://www.dreamwidth.org/latest) earlier today, and a major portion of the posts on there were blatant spam for things like credit card scams, "Work from home and make $1000/day!", and so on.
You seem to be hosting a lot of spam, and those spam posts are also far more likely to be getting linked externally on sites like Facebook, since that's the reason they're being created.
Because Dreamwidth is effectively free website hosting along with a free new subdomain for each account, blocking individual subdomains is futile, and it's difficult for external sites to distinguish between spam and legitimate blogs.
I'm sure Facebook will unblock you fairly soon, but unless you get the spam on Dreamwidth under control, this will probably happen fairly often with different sites blocking it. It would be easy to end up with an impression of Dreamwidth being a spam-hosting site, and decide to block it (either manually or automatically).
Blogspot has always been in a similar situation and would get blocked from a lot of sites due to the sheer amount of spam it hosts.
I worked at reddit for 4 years but quit in late 2016, largely because of the direction the site was starting to go even then. They've taken $500 million in venture capital in the last 3 years, so it's only going to keep getting worse as the pressure builds to create a return for those investors.
A few months after leaving, I decided to start a non-profit so I could work on building a community site that would be able to stick to the principles I believe are important: no advertising or investors, open-source, privacy, higher-quality non-fluff content, etc. There's more info about the site and its goals in the original announcement post: https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes (HN discussion of the announcement here, but note that it was completely private at the time and you couldn't even view it without getting an invite first: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17103093)
It's still invite-only for registration, but it's relatively active and consistently gets several hundred posts/comments a day. If you (or anyone else here) is interested in an invite, please read the blog post I linked above and send me an email at the address listed in there and I'll be happy to give you one. It's not intended to be much of a barrier, I just want to keep the growth controlled while we continue to get the site culture built up.
I've already paid that opportunity cost to get most of the basic functionality built, so if you're interested in helping with development on Tildes itself or even adapting it for your own similar site, it might be worth taking a look at the code as well. This is probably the best place to start: https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING....
It doesn't. Even the address for the other half of the duplex (my address + 2) works fine. Sometimes we just provide that address instead and catch the delivery people when they arrive, because it's easier than worrying about the Maps issue.
My address has been blatantly broken in Google Maps for years now. When you enter it, for some reason it deletes the house number and just looks up the street, which ends up pointing to somewhere about a 10 minute drive away. For example, if my address was "123 Elm Street" it just ignores the "123" and searches for "Elm Street" instead. We have to give special instructions all the time to delivery drivers and other people we give our address to, to warn them and make sure they don't end up going to the wrong place if they use Maps.
I've sent feedback and error reports about this repeatedly, and even had a friend that knows someone that works on Maps pass it on to them directly. It's never been fixed, and I've basically just given up on it at this point. It's really shown me how impossible it is to get any kind of support from Google for even an extremely obvious, straightforward issue.
Here's the discussion on HN at the time too (note that the site was totally private at that time and you couldn't even view it without an invite yet): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17103093
I assume drannex will run out of invites soon (thanks for offering them!), so if anyone's interested in an invite please feel free to email the address in the blog post and I'll send you one tomorrow. It's not intended to be difficult to get an invite, I just want to keep the growth controlled while a base site culture and more features continue getting built up.
I use a Bloom filter for this as well, but in Redis using the RedisBloom module. This was really easy to set up, but it does mean that it requires about 1GB of RAM or so (depending on error rate) dedicated to it, so it wouldn't be ideal if you're constrained for RAM.
I run a separate Redis server specifically for this purpose, which means when I want to update the list, I can build the Bloom filter on my local machine, and then just transfer the RDB file to the server and replace the previous one.
It's not a competitor to Reddit in any meaningful sense though. If anything, my "target user" is almost the complete opposite of what Reddit prioritizes now. Calling it a competitor probably only makes sense if you still think of Reddit as the way it was like... 5-10 years ago.
It's invite-only to register, but feel free to email me at the address in the blog post and I'll send you one. (That offer's open to anyone else too.)
I was really excited about Scroll when I first heard about it, but after I looked into it more I lost almost all interest. I was looking at it almost a month ago, so it may have changed a bit since then, but at the time, the main things were that:
1. Even though almost all of the material about Scroll says "300+ sites supported", it's actually about 30 sites, mostly from the same few networks, and 304 "SBNation blogs". This was the list of domains initially supported: https://gist.github.com/archon810/b4ec827d5fbe9e22a43ad39ca2... (and I broke down that list by owner here, if anyone's interested in that: https://tild.es/lc6#comment-4ij7)
So if it's a site that's supported by Scroll that also has a paywall (like The Atlantic), you're expected to both subscribe to the site and Scroll to get a "clean" experience. It's also notable that even though the New York Times is one of the main investors in Scroll, they apparently don't currently intend to support it themselves (mentioned here: https://www.poynter.org/business-work/2020/revolutionary-a-h...).
Yes, that's definitely planned over the longer term, but the community is too small to support highly-specific groups for now. Various other "reddit clones" have made the mistake of allowing users to create communities immediately, and they ended up with thousands of inactive, abandoned ones.
Even reddit itself didn't support subreddit creation for over 3 years. It takes a long time to have a userbase large enough for it to work.
In the meantime, Tildes has a pretty flexible tagging system to help categorize topics, and tags can transition into formal groups quite nicely.
The costs to keep it running are already covered by over 10x with the current donations, and I believe the existing servers could easily handle at least 100x the current traffic level.
In terms of advice, I'd say:
- Don't go into debt (or take any investments) to launch the site.
- Build something lightweight so the costs are low. Use dedicated server(s), avoid cloud hosting like AWS.