It’s sort of a different concept. Posts and users also have position in addition to age and score. The sorting algorithm gives you complete control over how much to weight each one. It’s like if new and hot existed on a continuous spectrum. It’s sort of like what Aaron Swartz initially wanted to do with Reddit where what you like would be able to inform what you might like in the future. But in this case you get complete control over how much that matters.
I’m adding bits and knobs here and there every day. Yesterday I added the ability to have posts that are hidden from the front page. It’s probably not a feature people will use every day but it’s there if someone wants it and it’s things like that I’m working on every day. In a little bit I’m going to add a “post whenever” feature in case someone wants to post a ton of content and have it actually post over time.
I’d say all and all the project has been a success for what I wanted to do with it and I’m happy with what I’ve built. The other side of it is trying to build community on the site. For example we do a movie night once a week on Saturdays.
Oh. Another thing that is different to most reddit clones is that every community exists. Like you don’t have to create a community to post to it. Just post to it. Different capitalization maps to the same community.
You guys should check it out. It would be super awesome if anynone wants to help fill in the more obscure topics.
you might wanna name it something different than Matrix, a decentralised messaging protocol.
I know. Around the time I did the first bout of development on it, Matrix decided they were going to become Element which was going to free up the name. They decided to keep both. I’m at a loss for a good name that describes that posts have position. That the posts exist in a matrix makes sense to me. I have plans to run a poll on a name change. I know I could always do something completely random. Like Lemmy. That doesn’t tell you what it does at all. But my particular brand of creativity makes me want to name things functionally. And Matrix is just so freaking perfect for what it is. All the other similar options are way too nerdy. Latent, vector. I just need to get down with the truly random.
Ideas would actually be super helpful.
Matrix is the messaging protocol. Element is the chat app built on the Matrix protocol. It was originally named RIOT.IM. They changed the messengers name from Riot to Element, the name Matrix was never going to be changed, mostly because those are separate things. They dropped the name to avoid litigation from Riot Games.
Matrix is a framework that has multiple chat applications, Element was just one of them.
That’s not right Matrix was never going to become Element.
Well I screwed up. The other reason why I didn’t worry too much about it is at one stage it was just an internal project name and I just kept working on it, to the point that I think it’s worth sharing. Yeah, figuring out the right name for it is a step I should do quickly.
Call it Downie Upers
Ok. That will be a candidate for the name change.
“updoot”
Clear what you’re referencing, IMO flows nicely and AFAIK (IANAL) isn’t a trademark
Linked List Array Node Key Value Pair Attribute
So many of us came here from Reddit because we felt burned by them, and the whole monolithic architecture feels like it risks getting corporatized. I came to a federated place because it seems much less likely to have that happen. Not really interested in that model currently.
Yeah. Giving big corporations control over what other people say or think and allowing them the power to warp people’s perception of consensus is guaranteed to put them at odds with their user base. And it’s always a matter of time before that ends up affecting your particular user group. For what it’s worth I have no interest in controlling what people say or think.
I don’t know if that fully answered your question. Basically I think the line between good and bad is whether or not you are dealing with a large corporation. Federation is just one way of ensuring that. Then other is just not using corporate social media in general and you end up on the right side of the line in either case.
In some ways the web itself is decentralized. Not decentralized is when the users of the internet become concentrated on the 20 biggest sites. That’s what gives you reddit. Being an element of a large decentralized whole without contributing to concentration is a kind of decentralized. My interest is to make the web itself more decentralized (less concentrated) and increase the diversity of algorithms and distinct communities people see the world through and interact with.
Either way it’s something I made and people can check it out. That’s what I love about the web as a layer of decentralization. Not many other kinds of decentralization let you do that.
That’s what the founders of Reddit believed when they started. We all jumped ship from Digg because Digg became too corporate and greedy, and Reddit was our safe haven.
Now here we are, over a decade later, and we’re jumping ship again because Reddit has become too corporate and greedy.
Lemmy has the advantage of being decentralized, with no single person or corporation running it, and you’re proposing a Reddit clone, run by an individual? Honestly, I love the ideas you have for Matrix, I love what you’ve accomplished with it, and I love your optimism for the site. But I’ve been burned too many times in the past by hopeful honest innovators who let money and power slowly corrupt them over time. Unless you can add your site to the federation, I’m gonna have to pass, even as enticing as your site looks now. I’m too jaded to trust a single entity/corporation to host social media content.
Just wait. ;-)
Giving big corporations control over what other people say or think
Wait… what? Reddit is not a “big corporation”. Reddit also doesn’t have control over what people say, let alone think. Moderation on Reddit is done by the community.
Honestly I think your service sounds even worse than Reddit. Sure, you’re not as big but neither was reddit when they first started out. Unlike reddit it looks like your service does directly control things? You’ve got one policy for the whole site dictating acceptable content, while Reddit has thousands of policies created by users.
Ultimately I think the Lemmy is the right approach to this type of website. If you think you can do a better job then Lemmy, then by all means go ahead. But I think being on the fediverse is table stakes.
Reddit is not a “big corporation”.
How big is big? They’re working on a 6.5 billion dollar valuation. Sure, that’s not S&P 500, but that’s not your mom and pop coffee shop.
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/01/reddit-seeking-a-valuation-of-up-to-6point5-billion-in-ipo.html
Too much far right content. You can’t have that stuff on there.
It would be honestly more helpful if you posted a link to this “far right content” as proof of your point.
You are always welcome to change that.
I am trying to make it more balanced. In an ideal world I would like it to be here: https://img.gvid.tv/i/4EhvD43g.png
But like I said elsewhere I’m not in the market of controlling what other people think so I’m going to let people who decide they want to influence what the site becomes do exactly that. Influence it. Anyone can.
I think this is one of the benefits of positional posts. On every site it seems that there has to be a conflict over who occupies it in exclusion to others. But what if these people just interacted less? What if people who want to see only posts like their way of thinking could get exactly that. And people who want to see an uncurrated representation of all thought could see that. That’s the benefit of positional posts plus letting people weigh the factors of the algorithm themselves.
Maybe small free speech sites always end up dominated by the wrong people because the right people give up too easily. The problem is it relegates every small project to being one thing no matter how unique a project is or what kind of cool potential it has unless that project engages in the same kind of control that made us hate reddit. All because one side wants to fight to promote their ideas and another side just wants to be comfortable.
Any possible interest I had just evaporated with this response. Why would I share a space with bigots and fascists when I could just choose not to do that?
my interest just went up when I know one less virtue signaler doesn’t want to be there!
Have fun!
Maybe small free speech sites always end up dominated by the wrong people because the right people give up too easily.
You are running the place, who else is going to keep them from taking over? People who are not invested will just go somewhere else where the moderation takes care of the terrible people.
What’s going to stop you from taking over? It’s a completely symmetric situation until you decide the world shouldn’t be defined by effort but instead utopia is defined by someone else applying thought control on anyone but you.
BTW pretty much all of those post would be allowed here. So your demand is that free speech sites engage in a level of moderation beyond the site you currently use.
What’s going to stop you from taking over?
Why would I come clean your house when I could visit a house that’s being kept clean?
The benefit for far right assholes is that you don’t kick them out. That’s why they’re there. What’s the benefit to me? Why would I show up?
a house where there is one less guest telling the host how to clean the place and who to accept in sounds nice.
You’ll love crack houses!
What’s going to stop you from taking over?
Sane, rational people don’t want to take over anything. We just want to vote for reasonable governments, let said government get on with governing and get on with our lives. We don’t want to be bombarded with all this political bullshit everywhere we turn - MAGA stickers and Fuck Biden stickers, you can’t open any comment thread on any public social media post without some idiot blaming Biden for the most ridiculous things.
Since the growth of the internet and social media these right wing nazi fucktards have figured out they can weaponise their followers to take over anything at any level and with your attitude to this site that’s exactly what I predict will happen there.
until you decide the world shouldn’t be defined by effort but instead utopia is defined by someone else applying thought control on anyone but you.
It’s always portrayed as “thought control” when it’s inconvenient for people to be protected from an onslaught of dangerous, vile hatred. But that’s absolutely, positively, so stupid and dead wrong.
Say your site becomes a haven for paid killers. Will you step in then? Or say it becomes a space for CP. Where does your “make it whatever you want!” schtick cross the line? Content moderation exists for a reason. And that reason is we live online these days. What happens online is happening to real people. And the online life of those people can very quickly turn physically dangerous. Are you pro-dangerous situations for people in the name of “do whatever you want?” I mean, your actions would suggest “yes.”
I get it. You’re a libertarian-leaning person and you believe in a free exchange of ideas. But that’s not all the internet is anymore. If this were a physical community you built and wanted to see flourish, would your beliefs of “everyone do whatever you want, no one here will stop you” still apply? Of course not. Because communities do have people that need to be looked out for. Your site is no different. Being hands off with hatred isn’t admirable, no matter how much the new e-right wingers want to shout it over and over. It creates danger for people and only serves to spread that hatred to larger audiences because it’s being platformed. So you’re not pro-“free speech.” You’re pro hate. And that’s a stance even most right wingers know to outwardly stay away from.
But here’s the kicker: those rich, powerful people promoting that type of unregulated speech are benefitting from that type of hatred spreading. But they can’t say that out loud. You’re doing the same thing without an ulterior motive which is…maybe even worse?
Why is it called Matrix when Matrix is already a decentralized chat?
Yet another far right conspiracy dump, just with a more garbage layout and design than anything else.
It doesn’t have to be. You guys can make it whatever you want ;)
Oh I just saw the youtube video you posted the other day.
That wink makes more sense now.
You’re one of them.
Course they are. Who else could possibly think that being tolerant of Nazis is a good game plan for a social media site
Always with those weird red laser eyes in the thumbnail.
No, that’s not how it works. You absolutely have to set a minimum standard (which excludes nazis) otherwise the nazis drive everyone else away.
You can find this out the hard way or you can look into the history of every reddit replacement platform over the last 10 years. They all got overrun with nazis because of attitudes like yours.
“wink wink” 🙄🤡
I’m always interested in looking into alternative social media networks … especially decentralized ones that are more open - open to everything (without devolving into extremist communities) and also open source
It would be nice to know what the background on your project is … is it open source? is it a team of people? is it just you?
What are your metrics and stats? … How many users are on there so far? … How do you sign up and are there any restrictions?
Also, how is it moderated? … or is it moderated?
And if it has no restrictions or moderation … it’s not a big deal when the community is small but over time as the numbers grow, moderation of some sort is necessary or the whole thing will just devolve into a mess.
Also, in this day in age, everyone is a lot more skeptical of one another … so an important question for me is … who are you? what is your background? where are you from? … (and obviously, I don’t mean for you to completely dox yourself but just to give a general idea of who you are as a person and a bit of your history)
Wait, what? A user posts a thing to a server, and that thing isn’t then duplicated to 50 other servers … yeah, I don’t see how that can work.
(I’m just kidding - your site looks neat.)
Thanks
You know that happens with centralised sites too, right? It’s invisible because all the redundant servers are behind the same domain name.
Edit: I think I missed the joke, sorry everyone.
I don’t think they were talking about actual physical hardware.
Large centralised systems have international mirrors, you know that right?
And even if they were somehow all in the same building, that wouldn’t be a good thing. Redundancy makes a service robust, and copying data isn’t exactly difficult.
I’m commenting under the impression that the guy was talking about the fact that the system is not federated, not that he was talking about physical hardware.
For what it’s worth, I’m a senior developer who spent 8 years at Amazon partially working on developing and scaling systems that received millions of requests per day.
Yeah, I’m assuming that too. Although on my first reading they appeared to be making fun of the way the fediverse does things, on my second reading I think they might be making fun of how people talk about the fediverse, in which case my response wasn’t appropriate. Oh well ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
So this is centralized?
Great work, congrats. The UI needs serious work though.
I wouldn’t say it needs serious work, I kind of like the homebrewed look of it, but there’s a lot of wasted space in the form of padding on mobile. I think the list of posts could just take up the full screen width and it’d be good.
Is it okay to openly say that you’ve cloned another product, or promote a product as a clone of another? I honestly don’t know the legal precedents, and know that there are many sites that have copied elements of other products that they intend to compete with, but reading the post title gave me a sinking feeling of Reddit lawyers perking up.
The site looks nice, and I really hope that I’m just being paranoid about possible legal exposure.
There are three issues:
- Copyright
- Trademarks
- Patents
For copyright, you have to make an exact copy - which OP didn’t do. Even then it’s not perfect protection, sometimes you’re still allowed to make copies (e.g. Google copied Java several years ago, and the court said that was OK).
For trademarks, there has to be confusion over who sells the product. OP isn’t trying to impersonate Reddit so they’re fine there as well.
With patents… yes, if Reddit owns any patents on their service, then OP has a problem. But I don’t think they do. Also patents are relatively short lived. You only get exclusive rights over your invention for a short period of time then everyone else is allowed (indeed encouraged) to copy it.
You have some interesting idea!
What I’d love to see is for it to be ActivityPub enabled, let us browse your thing from here! This would benefit you and us!
Also, you need to change the name, too much things are named matrix, maths, the decentralised platform, the movies and more!
Also, design-wise it really feels like a WIP, which I understand it is!
What does “Display chan style” do?
Thinking about making a Reddit clone myself…
