Alternatives to Reddit et al
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.