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.
Why is it called Matrix when Matrix is already a decentralized chat?
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.
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!
Thinking about making a Reddit clone myself…
What does “Display chan style” do?
