Ctrl
Take control of your data and life

Shift
Shift your mind and habits from mega social media to calm conversations

3
Do the above to better align your mind, body, and spirit

Escape Meta. Take a break from Reddit. Slow down. Share without overload.
https://ctrlshift3.com/

NO VANITY METRICS (likes, follows, bestest influencer ever)

Ctrl+Shift+3 was created because social media got out of hand. A clear sign is the fact that countries are passing laws preventing certain age groups from using social media. This tells you it's as risky as smoking or drinking alcohol.

We offer a calmer, more sane space to share thoughts and links. No likes, follows, or other vanity counts. Just posts and comments.

Not only is it more sane here but we include helpful features such as connecting posts (link), and joining Clicks (cliques) so that you and your friends or family can have a more private space.

There's also mentions so that you have a way to get someone's attention as needed, and a way to block others.

Users can export their data with a couple of clicks and delete their account. Plus, the only cookies we use are essential for the site to function. No advertising cookies or tracking cookies.

Finally, I added the Fediverse tag to this post because within a few days to a week we'll be finishing up phase 1 of a Fediverse integration, which is broadcast-only. And optional (users will need to opt-in for their posts to go out into the Fediverse).

I want to do this properly. Not a wall of bullet points, not a "we're thrilled to announce." Just me telling you what changed, the way I'd tell a friend over coffee or a beer.ForumSpark 2.0 has been the better part of almost a year of work, and it is easily the biggest thing I have ever built. So let me start with the part that matters most to the people who have been here a while. If you are already on ForumSpark, nothing gets taken away. A promise, not a launch-week softener.

Continue reading on the blog

Feels like 2023 all over again, a new exodus of people leaving the platform

I built Agora (agor4.com) as a place for open discussion with as little interference as possible.

What it is Topic-based communities Posts, threaded comments, and voting Ranking by Trending / Recent / Top Image uploads and link thumbnails Search, dark mode, basic notifications

How moderation works An AI checks new posts and comments for a narrow set of problems only:

Spam / obvious scams Content that is completely off-topic for the community

It does not police tone, politics, or unpopular opinions. Legal speech that is roughly on-topic stays up. Admins can still remove content when needed. What I deliberately avoided

Heavy personal karma / clout systems Showing community “creators” as a status thing Broad ideological or tone-based moderation

Current state This is an early public version. The core loop works. Some communities are still thin, and features will keep evolving. Feedback is welcome especially about moderation feel, ranking, and anything that gets in the way of actual discussion. Site: https://agor4.com

Hey all, we're the team behind InterPoll, a social network that (we think) actually can't be taken down or censored.

The idea: instead of everything living on one company's server, every browser running InterPoll is also a relay. If some relays go offline, browsers fall back to talking to each other directly. So there's no single server to pull the plug on, and no one who can quietly delete your posts.

Check it out here: https://endless.sbs
If you want the technical breakdown of how it all works: https://endless.sbs/interpollexp
And the code's up on GitHub: https://github.com/Interpoll1/decentralised

We built this because we genuinely think this is how social platforms should work by default. Would love feedback, bug reports, or just people poking around and telling us what breaks. Thanks for reading.

I've spent the last year building a social media platform. I'd love to know if this idea is ok or worth pursuing.

Over the past year, I've been building a social media platform called Doofr because I kept asking myself one question:

Why do users have almost no say in how social media evolves?

Every platform decides what features to ship, how moderation works, what the algorithm does, and what interactions look like.

I wanted to explore a different approach.

1. A community constitution

Instead of the platform making every decision, users vote every 3–6 months on features, moderation policies, and platform changes.

The ideas with the most support become the roadmap.

For example:

Should reposts exist?

Should moderation become stricter or more relaxed?

Should a feature be removed?

The goal is to let the community influence the direction of the platform instead of everything coming from the company.

1. No likes.

Instead of likes, Doofr has three customizable reaction categories:

🟢 Positive

🟡 Neutral

🔴 Negative

Users can choose which emojis belong in each category.

The idea is that reactions carry more meaning than a single "Like."

1. Your reactions train your feed.

If you keep reacting to piano videos, you'll naturally see more piano content.

If you react to science, photography, memes, football, cooking, or anything else, the feed gradually adapts.

If someone doesn't react much at all, AI can help recommend content until the system learns their interests.

1. More personalization.

Instead of being limited to standard emojis, users can upload their own images and use them in posts, comments, and chats.

Navigation is also customizable.

If you use Messages more than Search, move Messages to the front.

If you never use a tab, move it elsewhere.

The interface should adapt to the user instead of forcing everyone into the same layout.

1. Community-driven moderation.

One idea I'm considering is allowing posts that receive an overwhelming amount of negative feedback (for example, a 90% negative reaction threshold) to be automatically hidden or removed.

But I don't want to make that decision myself.

Whether that feature should even exist would itself be decided by the community through the constitution.

I'm not claiming this is the future of social media.

I'm just trying to answer a question:

Can a social platform be designed to evolve with its users instead of around them?

I've been building Doofr for the last year, and I'll keep building it for the next decade if that's what it takes.

I'd genuinely appreciate honest feedback. Because this isn't going anywhere.

What sounds interesting? What sounds terrible? What would you change?

www.doofr.in

Hey r/RedditAlternatives, I'm Mike, the founder of Fan Clubs; a community platform built to connect with others who share your fandoms.

I'm SUPER excited to share that invites are going out for everyone that signed up to test the Android app. You should have received instructions via email on how to download the preview app.

When you download and sign into Fan Clubs, you may be on an old version of the app. I'm hoping to release the native rewrite in the coming weeks. If you want to learn more about what the native rewrite means, skip to point six of the development story.

• Join Android Beta - I'll do another invite pass before the rewrite is released.
• Join iOS TestFlight - There's a stable release in the App Store, but if you want to be on the cutting-edge/parity release, here's how you get it!

Development Story

My goal has always been to build a native community experience for both iOS and Android users.... with full parity. As a solo dev, it's been a difficult road to figure this out. Just a few steps along the way.

1. Mobile App Company - I didn't have much dev experience, so I hired a team that specializes in creating mobile WebApps. The high monthly cost would be worth it for the guarantee launch from experienced devs. I provided a ton of details about the platform, they were ready to publish within 2 weeks to the app store -- no beta needed. Great up to this point. Then I reviewed the app store details -- 100% AI generated. I called them out and let them know why. There was a no refund policy, but they provided me one (unprompted). I appreciate the gesture there.
2. WebApp - I used a website called AppMySite (not sponsored) to build a WebApp for App Stores. AppMySite was fantastic and provided all the tools you needed for monetization, dev certificate setups. It's essentially website-to-app for dummies, but in the best way. I was able to learn how to integrate native element like liquid glass, Nav, got published on the App Store. This clearly wasn't going to be the long term native option, but I was happy to have started here.
3. Flutter App - I chose Flutter as my next step since it allowed me to build one app (not just webviews) that works on both iOS, Android, and other platforms. I solved some of my biggest hurdles while using Flutter, and the apps truly were a 1:1 match. In the end, I didn't want to compromise on the native approach, so I decided to move on in search of native parity.
4. Native iOS / Android Apps - As great as Flutter was, migrating from it to native was not fun. I spent most of my time in xCode building the iOS version, eventually matching the previous design with some improvement. Then I realized I didn't have it in me to do another port like that (to Android) since maintaining parity would be impossible.
5. Research, Research, Research... until I read about
6. Kotlin MultiPlatform // BINGO! - I never heard of KMP before my research pass, but it solved my biggest issues in achieving crossplatform parity; by allowing you to share non-ui logic between both platforms. You need to build is the native UI elements + shared logic and it's... Problem solved! Except Kotlin is Android's native language, so I had to go through that Android port anyways 💀

-----------------------

TLDR: A lot has happened, I found parity between apps, new releases coming to iOS TestFlight and Android Beta soon!

I can't speak freely on Reddit without receiving threats from them. Anyone know of a better app for communicating with others? Because this sucks.😝

What the fkkkk is flair?

With the wiki being out of date its always been hard for me to keep track of alternatives on here because they fade off the feed so fast.

I made a directory called ABetterFeed where people can post their alternatives and others can rate them. The idea is that platforms can build up reputation over time instead of just the tiny conversation that pops up every single time someone posts one.

I haven't added any alternatives to it myself so its totally blank. Anyone can add to it though (even if you're not the owner).

Happy to hear your feedback, good or bad!

I wanted to create a complete Reddit clone to alleviate getting started creating a Reddit alternative. When I browse this subreddit, I mostly see technical users mostly focused on creating different technical features that they think would be cool but is not product or solutions oriented i.e. it's built with no real problem for a particular group of users, just assumptions based on personal gripes or features that would be cool

This alternative is a bland Reddit clone that delivers many core functionalities of Reddit: https://github.com/Andrew-Chen-Wang/reddit-clone#reddit-clone

Reddit has become the default online format for internet forums; it's native in that most online users understand its UI/UX. The purpose of this clone is to deliver enough of the core forum functionalities akin to Reddit such that you can easily fork it, amend changes curated for your community, and deploy quickly.

The expectation (especially given this subreddit's user base being very technical) is that your technical, can deploy (or needs some assistance), and use a coding agent.

The key to starting a "Reddit alternative" is to start off with a community you interact with, understand their problems, and create your own community with features that alleviate those problems in a directed manner via technical features.

I appreciate any contributions including UI/UX fixes that aligns this more with Reddit itself. Feel free to ask questions on deployment or contribution.

The full write up:

Reddit Clone

The purpose of this Reddit clone is to democratize creating online forums for certain niches, customizing via forking for your particular community's needs, and easing the deployment of forums from idea/necessity to production. The point is not to start a competitor of Reddit; r/RedditAlternatives, the Fediverse, etc. online forums trying to compete are usually created by techies looking to replace Reddit by offering better features (e.g. UI/UX, data sharing/data ownership), when the real driver of forum growth is the community and how you curate it.

Reddit at its core is a forum designed for discussing within niche communities. Online forums have been around for a long time, but the most populated online forums are coalescing around Reddit's form of threaded comments such as YouTube; as more adopt this style of discussion, it's become the dominant format for online discussions when Reddit's UI/UX has essentially become the native feel.

With the dawn of LLMs, it's become even easier to copy this now dominant forum format. Reddit's most basic functionality is included in this clone. What I advocate readers is to fork this clone and edit it using coding agents like Claude Code to customize to how your want to curate your community.

What Edits Should I Make to Curate My Community

To begin, think of a community you want to target. In my case, I want to start "To Your Credit", a community dedicated to politikers and policy nerds who want to discuss seriously, can control their emotions, and see the other side.

The reason I chose this is that Reddit is dominated by very progressive individuals who abuse downvoting on Reddit to hide opposing opinions. This causes echo chambers via the upvoting system and dismisses and silences differing opinions. In particular, Reddit voting used to be about how informative a comment was. However, the expansion of Reddit to the most popular online format rendered it more for emotions rather than a curated community with core ideals of how the site should operate.

Now that I've stated my community and enumerated the problems, I want to make my own community. First, I would make a fork of this code base. Secondly, I need to add features that addresses the problems of the community at heart.

Problem 1: Unserious, emotional, or people who are unwilling to listen to other perspectives shouldn't be allowed to participate. The solution: an invite-only system where we verify a user's previous public commentary and certify whether their commenting history attests to their personality and thus a good member of the community. This is a straight steal from Raya, but some notoriously elite discussion circles are like this (e.g. Thiel's political circles, many political circles have invite-only group chats).

Problem 2: Downvoting dismisses viewpoints. Solution: in my fork, I would ask my coding agent to replace the upvote with a "coin" as if one we're giving credit to another person. It could be for making a good comment, or giving credit if it changes your mind. I would replace downvoting with a list of "reasons" for a user to choose from including a comment being poorly written, unsubstantiated such as using poor sources, etc. In my case, Reddit's algorithm still works very well in this system because our upvote/downvote system simply reflects Reddit's original upvote/downvote intent and algorithms.

Reddit's Downside

Because of how large Reddit's user base became, not only has voting become its more dominant form of "liking" and "disliking" based on emotion instead of Reddit's originally true intent, there is a more sinister thing about large communities in the first place: agreed upon rules and over stretching.

We can skip agreed upon rules because that's been touched on already i.e. voting. But over stretching is different in that the algorithm and features of Reddit are desigend for a broad user base, but many communities may want different features, allow different users in, etc. Those features might include ID verification, elitist entry, multiple voting systems, or in particular a certain algorithm.

Because of how generalized Reddit is, it can't support every community in its best effort. Maybe the best solution for Reddit as a unicorn company is to figure out how to allow communities to specialize in creation, but that makes other features of Reddit, in particular the personalization of the home page and recommendation system, more difficult. For example, changing the voting system (like adding multiple voting types) for one subreddit would make the recommendation system difficult to normalize/reconcile in addition to strange scaling requirements. Thus, the upper bound on Reddit's creativity was reached simply because of financial requirements (i.e. taking as much user attention) and competition to be the largest online discussion forum.

Thus the only solution is to democratize allowing communities to specialize in technical features that caters to the ideals and needs of the community itself. Democratization of more communities across different domains has its own downsides, namely discovery. This is something the Fediverse tried to solve via democratizing content, but finding community is still difficult, not because there aren't listservs, but because it's time consuming. It feels like discovering in-person meetups where you have to get the feel whereas a centralized, dominant forum like Reddit already gives you both a large user base and a certain vibe before even an interaction is needed.

Thanks for reading; enjoy: https://github.com/Andrew-Chen-Wang/reddit-clone

Hi folks,

I'm an IT nerd who found this subreddit and was curious on alternatives. Come to find out a lot of them are trashy. I've noticed a lot of folks are rather tech savy on this subreddit as well.

Consider this possibly the start of something new. If I were to create a reddit alternative, what would you desire from it? Most likely hosted in a country that doesn't require photo-ID verification, anonymous posting that's opt-out based, maybe E2E chatrooms based on communities? Also possibly overarching moderation to subreddits to prevent trigger happy bans/proper appealable removals and such. Additionally, fully dedicated servers or p2p?

I see reddit alternatives popping up at a constant, but if a reddit killer is to be made, then getting feedback from the community is what matters first. Thanks!

So I have some drama with a big Reddit clone that features a certain orange cat whose name begins with an M and ends in arsey. Naming it will get me banned, so I won't.

Anyway, I made an offshoot of it because I was mad at the main admin for making the site awful to use. Which made all admins mad, they're saying they're taking legal actions against my non-commercial forum; because I used the orange cat as my mascot. Something something virtue of use.

I would call it a solid Reddit alternative in its current state, and I'm pretty proud of it aswell. Front- and backend are both written in Rust btw. A lot of the logic was inspired by The Motte (my own implementation of it tho). It has a lot of features already, with more to come, so come try it out!

https://marseybook.hs.vc (I didn't feel like buying a domain since I'm not sold on the name yet.)

Oh yeah, AI disclaimer: I wouldn't call it vibe coded, since I actively wrote code (especially parts relating to security, since I expect belligerence) and kept it all within scope. I did use Claude Code at times to speed things up. If that makes me eligible for "vibe coded," then almost every alternative should be marked as such. I'm stating it because the admins on the orange cat side keep belittling MarseyBook for odd reasons: accusing me of installing keyloggers on users, calling me mentally insane, saying I hack their users, claiming I store passwords unencrypted, insisting it was all vibe coded, and saying they're calling their lawyers while refusing to tell me why. Generally attacking my good name, hence the statement.

I built CrowdWis because choosing a community before asking felt backwards. You ask first, then the question is routed to people who may have useful perspectives. Humans reply and AI helps organize the discussion.

It is live at https://crowdwis.app. Curious what people here think of the question-first model.

Where can a site like Reddit?

**ConfessHub** is an anonymous confession platform where anyone can freely share their thoughts, secrets, stories, or feelings without revealing their identity. The goal is to provide a safe and simple space where people can express themselves, read others’ experiences, and connect through honest conversations.

Currently, ConfessHub includes features such as anonymous confession posting, community reactions through upvotes and downvotes, comments and discussions, user authentication, a clean and responsive interface, and categories to help organize confessions. The platform is designed to be easy to use while maintaining users’ privacy.

There are many exciting features planned for future updates, including direct messaging, user profiles with customizable avatars, confession bookmarks, advanced search and filters, content moderation improvements, notifications, trending confessions, and many more enhancements to make the platform even better.

One issue I’ve run into is that Reddit automatically removes or takes down my post whenever I include my website link. Because of this, I can’t add the link directly in the post. Instead, **I’ll leave the website link in the comments** so anyone who’s interested can easily check it out.

Hey Everyone this is my first post ever on Reddit so hopefully I’m in the right spot.

I’ve been developing a bare bones (but extremely functional imo) social media site in AWS cloud over the past year or so, and although I have about 15 friends on the platform right now, I need to market this to a larger audience and get feedback.

The site is in the title, or it’s here - https://whusup.com

The idea is social media in my opinion has gotten very crappy and it’s driven by spam and profit based algorithms. This site has none of that, but allows you to share searchable content with tags somewhat similar to Reddit, allows you to follow friends, and has easy filters for recent or popular posts by category.

If anyone is interested please check it out and share your feedback.

The best chance to bury Reddit's censorship is to jump on a domain that is based on high quality long form and has momentum, low censorship and lives on a single domain that people can consolidate behind.

I'm of the opinion that the voting system should be liquidated so I know you'll say Substack doesn't have it and I'll say "good." So (insert four letter word) the Fediverse.

But the workaround is to use the top bar to create a master category called "categories." You cannot add 100 categories to the top bar - that would be ridiculous. Hide this category from the main feed.

Sticky a post to this. Then create a bunch of other hidden categories, but those hidden categories should still have the posts show up on the main feed but they shouldn't be on the tab. Sticky a post and hard link to these categories in the tab you created. And there - you have fought the design of Substack and caused it to work with categories.

Then the gloves can be taken off against moderators and low tier posters on Reddit who do not even read the posts before voting and commenting - and Reddit is powerless to stop you.

Just built and released a concept idea of a real-time social media platform where people can chat live in topic rooms.

Thoughts on the platform?

www.nolsup.com