There's a new free open source Reddit-style platform for the Fediverse called PieFed. It's still fairly early in development, but you can try out a demo server at:
@FediTips@piefedadmin@Mrfunkedude I just tested I noticed two basic and important things for a user:
1- I couldn't find the search function
2- the messages are not federated in full with mastodon only a part
@FediTips@Mrfunkedude@piefedadmin Hmmm, I do hope it succeeds, but this would be the... fifth Reddit competitor IIRC , with only Lemmy and Kbin/Mbin still standing.
That doesn't matter, as long as they're compatible. If they can show each other's threads, then each new platform helps the others get a bigger audience too and grows the overall network for everyone.
This isn't like centralised social media where new platforms are incompatible and split the audience.
It looks like PieFed is making an effort from the very beginning to make it easier for people to contribute, which is great. Love the long term thinking there!
@FediTips@Mrfunkedude There's also newly created Sublinks which is an alternative backend that's compatible with the lemmy api (and therefore mobile apps). It just started making the rounds over on the threadiverse, but they've already got significantly more contributors than lemmy and are making surprisingly fast progress. The long-term goal seems to be explicitly focused on trust & safety tooling.
There doesn't have to be a problem in order to create an alternative platform. It's healthy for the Fediverse to have several alternatives, as long as they're compatible with each other. Multiple platforms mean if one platform goes bad there are other platforms you can switch to without leaving the Fediverse.
Yeah I don't know about that bud, the site doesn't seem to show any favoritism to any instances specifically. There's recommendations for specific categories, there's instances by activity. They do blacklist instances from appearing on the site, typically for CSAM or other illegal material (No I won't list them but you can see the list on their github, benefit of open source, no trust element).
@FediTips@torgeros Most of the communities on https://piefed.social are literally just links to Lemmy.world and other Lemmy instances though so what’s the point?
It's totally separate software run by totally separate people. That's really important, because software projects do go bad sometimes, and if there's a compatible Fediverse alternative you can go there instead without leaving the network.
@FediTips
> It's healthy for the Fediverse to have several alternatives, as long as they're compatible with each other
True. There are already a number of other forum projects with at least some ActivityPub support, including KBin, Flarum, and Discourse. Plus a number of AP platforms with group features, like Friendica, Guppe and Chirp. Figuring how to achieve compatibility among them has been a challenge;