I’ve been missing how the internet used to feel.
No accounts everywhere. No tracking. No algorithms deciding what you see.
Just people posting and talking about things they find interesting.
So as a small experiment, I built a tiny anonymous community site.
People can discuss topics they care about without worrying about revealing their identity or getting banned.
I’m not trying to replace Reddit, just building something I wish existed.
I’d genuinely love any feedback, good or bad.
Link: https://frostas.com
16 hours and already full of antisemitism and racism. I hope you were trying for something better.
I miss the old internet, too, but the forums I was on had moderators. There were less people online. Things were less centralized. People didn’t have internet devices in their pockets all day. The websites we used were way less corporate.
And we're not talking the "genocide is bad" kinda anti-semitism but the real "genocide is good" kinda anti-semetism 💀
I installed phpbb. I'm the only person on my forum. I troll myself.
Hey I have a forum just like that!
Can you share it with us?
I started a phpbb forum for work. I'm still trying to get user adoption, but I think it'll be super useful!
Phpbb is pretty old school. If I was starting a new forum that people are actually going to use, I would use Discourse instead.
There's always SMF, Simple Machines Forum.
There are 99% of the alternative like this that miss the point of why we need alternative. While being anonymous is important, it's the moderation.
How do you effectively provide users with moderation to balance AI/botting vs censorship?
From experience, I’ve learned that when users can post freely without accounts and without moderation, things can go bad very quickly.
Right now, Frostas uses manual post approval. It’s not meant to censor opinions, but to filter out spam, AI-slop, and outright abusive content while the community is small.
Long-term, the goal is light-touch moderation focused on behavior, not viewpoints, avoiding both anything goes chaos and heavy censorship. This is still an experiment, and figuring out that balance is actually the core challenge I’m trying to explore.
Yeah this will never work. In theory this is just reddit. Just because you say the censorship is meant to promote good behavior doesn't make it so. All you will create is a set of tools someone can use to remove, silence, or ban posts. Regardless of your motive you will eventually give that moderation to someone who isn't you and that someone has a completely different view of what separates behavior from opinion and another reddit is born.
That’s a fair criticism, and I don’t disagree with the risk you’re describing. Any moderation system can eventually be abused once control changes hands, Reddit itself is proof of that. Right now, manual approval is just a temporary guardrail while the site is small.
If you have ideas for moderation models, I’d genuinely like to hear them. This project exists mainly to explore that exact problem.
Since I've been looking for Alternative developers who not only understand this but can executive it.
The key is self-moderation. You will not provide any group of users the power to moderate EVERYTHING the other users see. (Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, something, something).
For this strategy to be effective you need few things:
A trustworthiness rating assigned to each user, based on a criteria like: # of upvotes for them in the last 6 months, bot-like behavior, the time user joined the platform and sub before their first post.
Public accountability of human moderators. When they remove post or ban users. these actions will be clearly stated in the record for the public to see. Each sub is required make this summary statement per quarter visible on their home page.
A customized crowd-sourced-rating and filter system. Your platform will give flexibility to create sub's own rating systems and users will be allowed to filter based on that. For instance, a Political rating that has a slider between right vs left weighting in Sub A. If a user ONLY wants to see left leaning content above 60% cut over any posts in Sub A OTHER users vote below 60% will be INVISIBLE to that user. Will this promote echo chamber, yes. But the choice is up to the user themselves to keep their heads in the sand instead of the moderator that bans them. Make a separate rating system for fake news, AI content, local vs global relevance, aforementioned trustworthy rating.
I don't have an answer I can give you that is proven to work but I would say moderation and governance are somewhat related. You can likely find ideas based on how democratic systems (are supposed) to work. With that in mind perhaps moderators can be made accountable for their actions. As a quick example (I'm not saying its a perfect example) maybe users can vote to remove/replace a moderator.
This can also be abused if not implemented correctly. You would need to ensure it can't be spammed. Perhaps you can give people "votes" based on their interactions with the sub, giving a louder voice to those who frequently interact with that sub.
I'm not saying this is the answer but in short unfettered power in the hands of a few has shown, time and time again, to lead to megalomania. Therefor if that power needs to exist then it needs to be wielded by the many.
This discussion always brings to mind the John Hodgeman story he did on This American Life about superpowers. He posed the question to people, "Would you rather have the power of flight or the power of invisibility?"
His conclusion is deceptively simple but profound: that your choice reveals the tension between who you want to be and who you fear you are.
Moderation should always be designed for the sake of the reader (some people want to read offensive stuff, some do not, but none wants to read straight up spam and noise), based on their preferences.
It's not trivial to do. In fact, it's very hard to do.
Solutions may involve webs of trust (so a user can define a set of users they always want to read from), mandatory tagging of certain kinds of content (so users can exclude it or include it, based on their preferences) and more.
https://xkcd.com/927/
Reddit is not a standard.
Any place where you "can't get banned" ended up being choked with spambots and extremely toxic trolls. Saw it happen to VOAT, to USENET, and every other chatroom or forum that wasn't actively moderated by a real human.
Otherwise, I'm with you. I miss the old internet of 20 years ago.
I used to be mod of several places like that, sort of an online Cheers bar, "where everybody knows your name". Learned quickly to use a light touch; encouraging lively discussions of diverse views while not tolerating trolls, personal attacks or attempts at cheating around the rules (of which there weren't many, mostly just Bill and Ted's "Be excellent to each other"). Siskel and Ebert was the tone I was going for. Or The Muppets.
Don't miss dialup though. lol.
Unlike X and Facebook, which you absolutely can and will get banned, but everything is still riddled with bots and trolls.
“Was Adolf right”, is your second post on this reddit alternative…
What does this have over https://Piefed.social ?
It's already well established and Decentralised
[deleted]
it's currently have a basic built-in search available in the footer.
I miss the old internet too, cica 2000-2010.
But we'll never get it back. The solution is to move on to something new.
Sorry, your forum is full of nasty comments after each post. No thanks
Your website looks cool, are you planning to implement ActivityPub support?
ActivityPub has 3 different website engines that can talk to each other. One of them is https://join.piefed.social/ , the code is on https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi . The two others are Lemmy and Mbin.
https://blorpblorp.xyz/home is a frontend that supports Piefed, the code is at https://github.com/Blorp-Labs/blorp
That's just the threadiverse (which technically also includes NodeBB and Discourse btw, though those are forums, not reddit-likes). ActivityPub / the fediverse is much more than just the threadiverse.
There's microblogging software like Mastodon, Pleroma, Misskey, and countless others (though most others are forks of these). There's blogs like Writefreely, Microdotblog, or Plume. There's Friendica for a Facebook alternative, Pixelfed if you like Instagram, Peertube for Youtube, Loops for Tiktok, Owncast for streaming, Funkwhale for music, or OurSpace if you like MySpace.
There's wiki software (Kiwi), federated AI training (Mycelium), book reviewing (Bookwyrm), chat (Shoot), marketplace (flohmarkt), event planning (Mobilizon), and github-likes (Forgejo).
And all of them can more or less interact with each other (with limitations due to differing supported functionality). And this "more or less" also applies to a lesser degree to the three you mentioned, there's not perfect compatibility between them.
Indeed, but as this is a RedditAlternatives sub, I mentioned the three that follow the Reddit format
Sure, but my issue was that the way it was phrased, it looks like it's meant to be a full list, not an open-ended one, for all of ActivityPub.
Yeah why not build on the existing standard? Dunno why you're getting downvoted.
the worst part of reddit now is the ai mods . got banned for posting on another subreddit attacking a ai BOT and because i was calling it names i got banned even though i was fussing that the bot was not allowing me to mention other platforms that the ai tool was actually ON because it thinks it was "off topic".......... and because of that yeah............ its terrible when reddit has too much lazy ass actual mods they rather use ai to do the jobs they should be doing. (i dont hate ai i love ai but in this case ai has not helped in moderation in reddit) .........another time i got flagged for a post that was not even remotely breaking the rules but the ai mod thought it was.
if your gonna use ai mods at least get BETTER ai to back them with.
Thank you! I’ll definitely use it!
Would love to hear your thoughts once you try it.
Based.
A simpler Internet? Gemini? :) https://geminiprotocol.net/
And here's a nice client: https://gmi.skyjake.fi/lagrange/