Big Tech is increasingly censorious, essentially an online oligarchical police state spreading to the offline world. With that in mind, you might want to avoid some of their services. Reddit is one such site, who is going so far as to ban people for liking the wrong comments, truly beyond STASI levels.
So what can you do? Well, the first option is to migrate activity to some friendlier places. Unfortunately, due to the way networks work, they are more useful the more other people use them (‘network effect‘). This makes it very difficult to make a new competitor, as it needs to reach a very fast growth rate to hit a sufficient number of users to stay useful compared to the traditional sites. So what are some Reddit alternatives? There is of course a subreddit for that question too. Some options, and their traffic indexes per Alexa.com, from August 2019 and now.
(After making the below, I found there was an updated version here…)
| name | url | rank 2019 Aug | rank 2020 Oct | rank change (negative better) | rank 2020 Oct | features |
| parler | parler.com | (not listed) | 4,990 | 1 | ||
| the donald | thedonald.win | 40,900 | 5,855 | -35,045 | 2 | |
| gab | gab.com | 14,100 | 8,210 | -5,890 | 3 | open source |
| minds | minds.com | 20,800 | 11,886 | -8,914 | 4 | open source |
| steemit | steemit.com | 14,600 | 21,421 | 6,821 | 5 |
open source, blockchain
|
| papaly | papaly.com | 40,000 | 24,298 | -15,702 | 6 | |
| voat | voat.co | 11,700 | 28,276 | 16,576 | 7 | reddit-based |
| mastodon | mastodon.social | 26,700 | 43,495 | 16,795 | 8 |
open source, federated
|
| mamby | mamby.com | 173,000 | 51,649 | -121,351 | 9 | |
| saidit | saidit.net | 45,800 | 52,195 | 6,395 | 10 |
open source, reddit-based
|
| sapien | beta.sapien.network | 224,000 | 84,273 | -139,727 | 11 | |
| snapzu | snapzu.com | 70,500 | 89,644 | 19,144 | 12 | |
| pillowfort | pillowfort.social | 132,000 | 90,627 | -41,373 | 13 | |
| notabug | notabug.io | 51,000 | 96,584 | 45,584 | 14 |
open source, federated, reddit-based
|
| hyvor groups | groups.hyvor.com | 491,000 | 121,565 | -369,435 | 15 | |
| lobsters | lobste.rs | 186,000 | 269,768 | 83,768 | 16 | open source |
| raddle | raddle.me | 206,000 | 297,317 | 91,317 | 17 |
open source, reddit-based
|
| hubski | hubski.com | 202,000 | 322,244 | 120,244 | 18 | |
| poal | poal.co | 156,000 | 380,817 | 224,817 | 19 | reddit-based |
| yours | yours.org | 444,000 | 748,538 | 304,538 | 20 | |
| tildes | tildes.net | 465,000 | 2,093,349 | 1,628,349 | 21 |
open source, reddit-based
|
| phuks | phuks.co | 490,000 | 2,830,297 | 2,340,297 | 22 |
open source, reddit-based
|
| shufflehex | shufflehex.com | 94,900 | 5,689,347 | 5,594,447 | 23 |
Comments
So what to choose?
- I generally avoid Parler because of reasons given in this post (yes, she is a crazy person, but this criticism seems legit; she’s entertaining on Twitter etc, and yes, there are nudes; yes, post was deleted for ??? reasons).
- I don’t care so much about Trump, so The Donald is not that appealing. I also think Trump will probably lose. I am public with my forecast, I give Trump about 33% chance to win. If he loses, this site will have questionable value.
- Gab is a twitter alternative, not Reddit. The Gab growth is pretty impressive though. Maybe I should look into cross-posting content.
- Steemit looks like this:
- The most Reddit-like sites are Voat (‘vote’), Saidit (‘said it’ like ‘read it’), Notabug, and Raddle. The last is basically a Reddit clone, with same theme too. Saidit and Vote the best, but even their traffic ranks are dropping.