There has been a lot of talk in this subreddit about migrating off of Reddit due to the 3rd party access/mobile app issue.

The site Tildes has been mentioned.

You may not want to migrate there.

I got an invitation to register yesterday, signed up, and read about half the documentation. The documentation included a description of the creator's philosophy about social media sites. It sounded incredibly Cool!

I made a bunch of posts, a bunch of comments, and had a great time.

One day later I am banned from the site.

I didn't get any description about what happened.

All of my interactions were positive except for one.

A guy made a comment about how he felt like many places on Reddit and other social media were juvenile. I replied back to him. I told him I agreed, I told him I thought subreddits for TV shows were the worst and beyond that the worst example I've seen has been a Facebook group for my city.

Some other person, out of nowhere, replied to me stating that he thought my comment was the most juvenile comment he ever read on Tildes.

I replied with one word: "Adios!".

I thought that was a mild reply to an unprovoked rude message.

Well, it got me banned.

I look at the guy's profile page before I was banned. It looked like he was/is a developer at Tildes or significantly involved in some other way ( I just skimmed his profile) . Our exchange was deleted by an Admin.

Bottom line, Tildes is not free of the kind of bullshit you find in the worse parts of Reddit.

Edit

There is a person posting repeatedly in this thread and elsewhere stating that I am a liar.

I know that means nothing on the Internet, but I take issue with that.

S/he is posting a link to that admin's account of events. An account which isn't true. I suspect that admin is trying to cover his/her ass.

That person also blocked me so I could not respond to them lying in this subreddit about what I wrote.

I don't know about all of you, but if I came across a false story about a web site I use, I might respond once. It would be unlikely that I would use my time to post about in several places repeatedly and emotionally on another web site. It makes you wonder if that person is more than just a user at Tildes.

Edit 2

Thanks much to whoever gave me that cash bag award!

Source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/02/reddit-plans-to-lock-some-content-behind-a-paywall-this-year-ceo-says/

Also a thread on /r/technology

I've seen a lot of back and forth on this sub and thought to make a post of all the good alternatives I've tried and which ones I would recommend. Right now, most of these are in early beta so don't expect something completely hassle-free. Instead, focus on which ones have the most potential to be something special.

UPDATE: JAN 2024

Hey everyone! I'm revisiting this post to give you some updates and shaking things up in my rankings. It's become clear that Lemmy is the winner of the most popular Reddit alternative right now. Aside from fixing most issues, it now has dozens of mobile applications (My favorite being Eternity for Lemmy) and alternative front-ends (My favorite being https://alexandrite.app/ ). The community isn't massive but there are thousands of active users that make everything lively. I would recommend Lemmy above everything else unless you have a specific reason you wouldn't want to use it.

As for active Lemmy servers, I was kind of right on the money in my original post. Lemmy.world is the leading instance with the most support but you should try a different instance to spread server load. I have some recommendations in the next section:

Lemmy

The most popular alternative right now. Lemmy is the most similar to Reddit and has a minimalist, simple UI. There are some controversies surrounding Lemmy but the TL;DR is just don't use official instances (lemmy.ml, lemmygrad) and instead use community ones because of their dubious moderation and communist views. Consider http://lemmy.world/ , https://sh.itjust.works/ , https://lemmy.ca/ , or more specific instances like https://programming.dev/ . I also recommend https://lemm.ee/ but beware that this instance doesn't block anything by default, so you may see hate speech and disturbing posts and will have to block people and instances yourself.

Again, Lemmy is a part of the Fediverse. It doesn't really matter which instance you are specifically on, since you can browse and communicate with other instances easily. What makes Lemmy a good option is that it's relatively stable, simple, and has a booming community. There are also mobile applications like Jerboa, and it seems like it might be getting the most support in the very near future.

Pros:

• Clean, reliable UI

• Decent mobile apps exist already

• Largest community so far

EDIT: lemmy.world is the most stable instance right now. I would recommend that one!

Tildes.net

Tildes is a promising alternative that's been gaining traction recently. It's still in early alpha and unfortunately is invite only. What's interesting about it is that it's text-only and seems like a place that fosters quality discussions. The goal isn't to be Reddit, but rather be a reddit-esque place without all the memes and shitposting.

pros:

• Very simple and straightforward

• Text-only, created for quality discussions

Fedia.io

Used to be my favorite before moving to Lemmy. Mbin is a part of the Fediverse. If you don't know what that is, think of it as a connected web where anyone can host a server and communicate with other servers. What makes Kbin so good is that it's really polished and feature-rich despite being in early beta. It can communicate with Lemmy and Mastodon, which means there's already a sizable community to jump into. The on-boarding process is good as well, you can just sign up and browse content without worrying too much about Fediverse shenanigans.

It has a few issues (namely that some smaller Lemmy communities don't show up for some reason), but it's likely they'll be fixed later. The dev is quite active, and there is an official mobile version planned. It's also a bit confusing for people unfamiliar with the Fediverse, but you'll get used to it quickly.

Pros:

• Clean GUI, perfectly good mobile website

• Well-connected with the Fediverse, shows Lemmy instances and Mastodon posts by default without much hassle

• Runs well without Javascript

Edit: Kbin seems to be getting hugged to death a lot lately. The server issues are making it struggle to keep up syncing with Lemmy, which makes a lot of posts not show up. For the next few days you may have a better experience on Lemmy until things calm down.

EDIT 2: If kbin is still chugging, consider signing up on https://fedia.io/ , which is another instance of kbin that seems to be running very well lately.

EDIT 3: kbin seems up and running! Come join us!

Squabbles.io

Squabbles is an interesting brand new website. It mixes the ease of browsing of Twitter with the long threads of Reddit. You can scroll down to quickly read posts and top comments without having to enter threads or click anywhere else. This seems like it could be a good casual talk website and a good place for memes. I can see myself browsing here when I'm bored.

pros:

• Very simple to use

• Fun for casual browsing

Other ones worth mentioning

• Raddle.me is a simple version of Reddit. The UI kind of embraces early 2000's websites with bright colors and weird side banners. There's nothing inherently wrong with Raddle but it seems kind of redundant compared to other ones mentioned.

• Sqwok.im is an interesting one where instead of comments, threads are a live chat anyone can hop into. Sqwok is pretty basic and is more of a novelty than a website I'd recommend for now imo. The idea of every thread being a chat means everyone is too split and the person you'll reply to likely left the chat an hour ago already.

• Pillowfort.social is a Tumblr alternative that may be gaining traction recently. I'm not a fan of Tumblr, but it's worth mentioning.

• Stacker News is a Hacker News clone (if you didn't get that from the title). I don't like it very much because it seems very crypto-focused and has web3 shenanigans with their own crypto coin you earn by posting. That always goes down well, doesn't it?

Closing thoughts

I understand the decision paralysis a lot of people are having, but really I think you should just settle down and try one. You're not making a blood pact by registering to a website and giving it a shot. Try some of these and settle on whichever is more comfortable to you.

Let me know if I missed any big ones.

I'm a refugee from RiF. In my first day on the official app I have been solicited for drugs via private message and approached by numerous bots. Oh, and I LOOOOOVE the ads and totally unusable interface!

EDIT: I have made an updated master list here

EDIT: DUE TO POPULAR SUPPORT FROM THE CAMPUS SOCIETY COMMUNITY - CAMPUS SOCIETY ARE FORMALLY OFFERING VICTORIA A ROLE IN LONDON

Victoria on Twitter

I'm a community manager for a small university/college based platform and while it'd be fun for me to tout us I think it'd be very useful for everyone to know what options are available to them.

I'm based in the UK but these should be very useful for a lot of people.

Stacksity - I think the concept of this is pretty great - it's really simple looking but it's obviously well put together. Subreddits here are 'stacks' and while these stacks aren't moderated the better content does rise to the top and you can explore various areas fairly easily once you have an account and subscribe to those that you're into.

I must admit I do find the $ prefixing everything kinda obnoxious though.

However nothing gets removed as far as I can tell and it's new so we should really cut it some slack and see how it grows. I'm looking forward to seeing how it expands.

Voat - Voat is essentially a Reddit clone - and that's OK. They have a karma system and the community is nice and welcoming and very open to discussion. It's very basic looking and if you're familiar with how Reddit works you'll be familiar with Voat works.

They get a lot of flak for being down often but it's run by a small but dedicated team who take donations to try and keep the servers up so it's rather admirable that they're doing as well as they are as whenever Reddit messes up people throw it around to immediately jump ship.

It's fun and fairly light though.

Snapzu - Snapzu is a much more polished looking link aggregator. You can post 'snaps' which are links/content to various channels that they call 'tribes' and it has a wide variety of subjects for you to explore. There's a rep system which accumulates over time with titles for you to get - but it does mean that those who have signed up earlier get more perceived clout than those that are new. At the moment you have to request an invite to join BUT they tend to dish those out quickly enough.

I have to say though it's not as...strongly opinionated as Reddit which is a good and a bad thing as it lends to very passive and dull comments.

Campus Society - This is purely aimed at university and college students so this won't be of any appeal those who aren't attending. You're grouped into channels where you can instant chat / post content with other students in your classes and university. This went live on Monday so it's very new in beta but there's also groups you can join similar to subreddits where you can chat / post and it's proving popular in London for a way of meeting new people who are at your university but haven't met yet.

It doesn't rely on upvotes / likes to determine user score but a 'GPA' system which goes up if users respond well to you and down if you're inactive over a long period of time or get reported by other users.

Full disclosure I'm part of the team here but if you have any questions I'm happy to answer them! (If your university isn't featured let me know and I can check that out)

Wechat - Now most people assume that this app, and sorry it's app based, is primarily just for the Chinese due to it's massive Chinese audience. Which is fair as it used to be Weixin and it did start in China. It does however have a massive, and very engaged, English speaking community and while there's as bit of culture clash it's actually a very interesting community to be a part of. However to find good content you have to find public accounts from people who post that content so you do end up having to put a bit of work in to find content you like.

I really enjoy the personal touch of that because there's a much more personal connection with these people as they tend to respond often, use actual names/faces, and have a real passion for what they're doing but it can be rather intense at times.

Aether - Another app based community however it's on the otherside of the coin. While Wechat is a hyperactive platform where you use your real name etc this is much more private scene which uses anonymous posting.

They're not likely to go down anytime soon though because their infrastructure does not rely on a centralised server setup but p2p. Their goal originally was simply to be a purely anonymous reddit so if you're privacy orientated this might be interesting for you but as it's links and not images etc most people might not find it that interesting - especially as it's in dire need of content and as anyone can pretend to be you it's hard to build any sense of community.

Yik Yak an interesting concept but the execution leaves something to be desired for the most part. Recent changes have improved the flow of conversation though which is good as you can identify who you're responding to and the community has taken steps to help cut down on abuse which was a problem early on. Yaks with -5 are deleted so the community polices itself.

Yaks are text based though and very short form so this might not appeal to everyone but it can be rather lighthearted and interesting for localised content.

The Student Room - This is an old school forum really primarily focused on UK students but it's got a wonderfully dedicated moderation team and a strong core community who are extremely helpful. Like most forums it is broken down into a wide variety of subjects/interests and users build rep through going their posts liked etc.

It's rather solid but it is definitely focused more on the UK student crowd.

Stumble Upon - This is how I found Reddit originally about 4 years or so ago as Digg was blocked at work. Stumble Upon is rather simple in its approach but it's a great way to view all types of content. Simply signup, select your interests, then click the Stumble Upon button and it'll randomly select you a tagged page/article/video based on what you selected. The community isn't really that big on commenting and what not, per se, but there is certainly something very addictive about clicking that button for new content.

Honestly I had so much love for this website I fear to go back.

Hacker News - This one is more for the tech orientated crowd and despite the overly abused 'hacker' title it's a great site for keeping in the loop with changes in the tech industry and for new and upcoming sites and startups.

After /r/technology took a tumble in quality I ended up just going back to Hacker News for quite awhile to be honest as it's simple, practical, and the community is very informed and helpful.

Product Hunt - This is a dedicated community focused on sharing and talking about the latest websites and startups. It's invite only if you want to discuss but you can vote until PH decide you're worthy of commenting. Some people complain of them being a tad elitist but I've met the team first hand and they're pretty dedicated to focusing purely on making a platform that's about showcasing the latest and greatest.

Though it does get a bit dull seeing the same people leaving comments and the discussion can be pretty thin.

Tumblr I'm expecting a bit (see lot) of flak for suggesting Tumblr but if you stay away from the echochamber angry ranty people and explore some of the more popular tags you'll find that there's a whole wealth of quality content worth reading. They're more into their TV/Film fandoms and so if you're not able to stomach that kind of thing you might want to pass but for lighthearted content it's not that bad.

Personally it's not to my liking but it's a viable alternative that while hated on will more than likely have something to cater to your taste.

Newsvine - I really like Newsvine - it's a small company that focus on linking out news but it's nowhere as extreme as /r/worldnews and the community is rather interested in current events. Discussion is small / limited however so you really have to put some effort in to generate discussion but it can certainly be worth it if quality and not quantity of replies work for you.

Frizbee I really dig how Frizbee are with anonymity and their general mission. Their mods are vocal but friendly but best of all their against censorship and really want to see their community grow in line with that. Which pretty much lends well to open discussion. They're in beta and while the site could do with some fine tuning it's a great experience despite the lack of polish.

Slicer This is small and ran by a single person, as far as I'm aware, but I quite like to lurk on it and have a nosey around. Terms of use are pretty standard but I'm looking forward to seeing how this evolves as there's steady traction and I'm not entirely sure if the admin has made a decision on how he wants to grow his site.

It can be a little messy though as the default page throws everything into "Any" as opposed to a space, which function like subreddits, but I kinda do like that as it reminds me of how /r/all used to be.

Seriously though props to this guy if it's just the one person as it's really well done.

Other sites, but I'm not familiar with them and will update post once I know more:

Linkibl

Wykop

Hubski

Piroot

FictionHub

Atob

UPRISER

Infobitt

stations.tv

Hereshot

Gameiki

Anyway I hope this is helpful to you /r/RedditAlternatives and I'd love to hear about any new ones that are coming out or that you love. I'm really into how the social dynamic of online communities work since the IRC/BBS days as a kid.

https://the-federation.info/platform/73

Was 150k 4 days ago! https://lemmy.ca/post/724386

UPDATE: June 22 @12:30am ....800k users

Not sure what triggered it, but admittedly I've upvotes lots of Green Mario Brother posts, 50501, and meme posts that imply that we must bring change (I'm being vague with my typing because...idk...fuck?)

I've pretty much looked into all the alternative sites posted on this sub up to this point. Some are pretty good but missing some features (which is understandable at this stage) but some are not usable at all. The only real contenders I see are:

• Discuit - I don't know why it took me this long to find this one, I guess they need to do a lot more shilling (they could learn a thing or two from the Lemmy and the Squabbles there). But this is by far the most promising one I've tried so far, it's being actively developed, the developer seems to have a lot of ideas for it's future, and UI wise it's insanely fast and smooth.

• Squabbles - An interesting platform that I'm going to keep an eye on but to be honest it's not really a reddit alternative. It's more of a hybrid of Twitter and Reddit. But far better than any decentralized site I can tell you that.

• Lemmy and kbin and others - If you're really into federated/decentralized stuff then whatever but for me this is not it. All around terrible user experience, incredibly laggy and often buggy.

• Tildes is nice and all but I have no idea why on earth these people don't open up signups because I'm pretty sure they could become a real competitor here.

There are a bunch of others I looked into but those had unsalvagable problems like being completely dead or full of racist idiots.

I see a lot of people on this sub talking a good game of decentralized platforms but I wonder if they know that to non-techies these platforms are confusing as hell. And they have no future of going anywhere. I don't really care about decentralization/federation to be honest and most people don't. Every aspect of it is too confusing. Which instance to sign up on. Which subs to subscribe to among the dozens of identical ones. Not to mention the technical issues of bugs and lagginess.

And what's to stop the admins of the instances from fucking up everything. The recent Beehaw defederation thing is only one of many such infighting that will keep happening. Actually it's difficult for me to trust instance admins than companies. The company will likely be there for years at least but the admin of your instance may get bored and decide to nuke the server. Why does he care, it's only a cost to him anyway. And now you have to create another account on another instance and do the whole thing all over again.

Okay maybe the centralized alternative goes all full spez in due time. But reddit was OK for like 10 years. If I can have another 10 years on a usuable platform that'll be a good enough deal. The perfect is the enemy of good you know, just join something that looks promising and help make it grow. Otherwise in a couple of months nothing would've changed.

I deleted my twelve year old account two weeks ago and I have no intetion of coming back here. Reddit has fucked up too manny times in the last six or so years and this API thing has finally done it for me. Just that it'd be a shame if this whole blackout thing ends up being nothing.

My deleted (by /r/PowerDeleteSuite) message history popped back up this morning on reddit. Looks like protests are hurting someone's feelings (and most likely wallet too) in reddit HQ.

This is just next level stupid on their part. And obviously also a pretty goddamn big issue to information security.

Fuck you /u/Spez

It’s literally a cunt of an app. Fuck you /u/spez.

“If a moderator team unanimously decides to stop moderating, we will invite new, active moderators to keep these spaces open and accessible to users,”

Leave it to reddit to manage to bring the concept of strike breaking and hiring scabs into the world of the internet. Cool. Cool. Very cool.

r/SyncforLemmy

This is pretty huge. Sync is a fairly popular 3rd party app, and having a good Lemmy app with a familiar UI will really, really help with getting people to migrate. (Jerboa is okay, but certainly has room for improvement.)

Hopefully with one established 3rd party developer taking the plunge, more will follow.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/blackcat-ransomware-gang-behind-reddit-breach-from-february/

Reddit have allegedly been hacked by AlphV (aka BlackCat), who write:

Operators broke into Reddit on February 5, 2023, and took 80 gigabytes (zipped) of data. Reddit was emailed twice by operators, once on April 13 and one again on June 16.

There was no attempt to find out what we took.

This is again another instance of Steve Huffman undermining his own agenda. He makes an effort to appear tough, but we are all aware of what happens to individuals like him when businesses go public, such as Adam Neumann of WeWork.

I told them in my first email that I would wait for their IPO to come along. But this seems like the perfect opportunity! We are very confident that Reddit will not pay any money for their data. But I am very happy to know that the public will be able to read about all the statistics they track about their users and all the interesting confidential data we took. Did you know they also silently censor users? Along with artifacts from their GitHub!

In our last email to them, we stated that we wanted $4.5 million in exchange for the deletion of the data and our silence. As we also stated, if we had to make this public, then we now demand that they also withdraw their API pricing changes along with our money or we will leak it.

We expect to leak the data.

Pass on the torch, Spez, you're no longer cut out for this kind of work.

A Mistake repeated more than once is a decision. - Paulo Coelho

I can't tell if this is real. If you're familiar with press releases, this one reads a bit cringy. but if true, this is juicy. Christian Selig is apparently joining Digg as an advisor.

If you remember Reddit’s APIpocalypse, Christian Selig was the dev behind Apollo, the 3rd party app they priced out of business. This is either confirmed tomorrow, or I'm being punked.

Hey everyone,

I'd like to really stress this point as there is quite some chaos with the choice in where to move to. I want to make sure, that everyone knows, that it's also important to use an federated/decentralised alternative which is also open-source (Lemmy is most popular there).

What does this mean?

Federated/decentralised means, that there isn't any single company who runs the infrastructure and who you have to agree to. We've seen plenty times, how we're dependent on Reddit - and it's costing us so much now. Sure, in the past 1.5 decades, we have the convinience of using Reddit - but now it's a good time to move away.

Federated means, that anyone who's slightly tech-savy can host their own server (or use a cloud service) with content. You can either join existing servers (called instances in Lemmy) or create your own one - and then you can create communities - which are just like Reddit subreddits. There is no company who can censor your server - as the data is in your server. You don't have you data sold by Reddit for profit - but you can ask kindly your community users to donate small amounts to manage the infrastructure (e.g. via Patreon).

Federated also means, that you can also view the content of other servers in your own page without opening a new website! This is the best of both worlds!

What is open-source? Open source means that anyone can see the source code and the code is changeable and developed in the public. It also means, that if you want a special feature X (e.g. better mod tools), then you're not dependent on Reddit. You can simply change the code (or ask a dev to do that) and use that new code in your server. If other server operators also like it, the global source code can be updated and other server operators will also use the improvement. This is how many parts in the global software industry work, and we can do this for an reddit alternative as well!

Please remember these things, when looking for an alternative for your community!