The Four Best Alternatives to Reddit

Reddit is melting before our eyes. Its CEO is using more and more wild tactics in an attempt to undermine the protests that began last week. In some subreddits, the moderator teams have been replaced or completely removed, meaning that even when the dust settles, these subs won’t be the same as they used to be. And many redditors are leaving on their own, moving to other servers and platforms to try and continue the communities started on the beleaguered social network.

(Slight update on the protests: Reddit recently proposed a change to their API that will go into effect on July 1st. With this change , third-party apps like Apollo and Rif will effectively cease to exist as their price has been reduced; tools that moderators used to run their subreddits have come under threat, but Reddit has since made concessions that at least some mods are fine; and Reddit is still unaware of availability, which means subwoofers like this, like r/Blind, it may not be possible to moderate after changes take effect.For more information, here is our explainer from the day the power outage began.)

There is no website or app that does what Reddit does. There used to be a close site – Digg, but many users who were unhappy with this site switched to Reddit in 2010 . Digg has changed enough over the years that migrating in the opposite direction is no longer possible.

So, Reddit users who want to go somewhere else are exploring other options. Here are some outstanding features.

Lemmy

Lemmy is a discussion platform where users can post links or other content, and people can discuss that content in threads. In this regard, it is very similar to Reddit.

But unlike Reddit, it’s federated. This means that you can join any Lemmy server and communicate with other Lemmy servers. It’s like email: you can be @gmail.com and still chat with someone on @hotmail.com. Or, in other words, Lemmy is to Reddit what Mastodon is to Twitter.

Lemmy has communities similar to Reddit, but they start with “c/” instead of “r/”. For example, Reddit has r/simpleliving , while Lemmy has c/simpleliving . You need to know the server the community is on (it’s lemmy.ml/c/simpleliving, not lemmy.world/simpleliving), so if your favorite subreddit decides to move to lemmy , find out where everyone says they are. going and follow this link.

Lemmy doesn’t have pros and cons, and there are far fewer users than Reddit, so it’s quiet there right now. At least one third-party Reddit app, Sync, will become a Lemmy client instead of a Reddit client once the Reddit API changes go into effect.

How to join Lemmy : Go to join-lemmy.org and select a server. Any server will do.

Kbin

Kbin is another federated discussion server – basically the same idea as Lemmy, but it also supports Mastodon-style microblogging. Much of what we said above about Lemmy is also true for Kbin.

Instead of subreddits or “communities” on Kbin, the equivalent is “logs”. Kbin is believed to be in beta, and like Lemmy, it’s not very crowded yet.

How to register with Kbin : Go to kbin.pub, clickInstances and select a server.

tildes

Tildes is another website trying to be the next Reddit. It’s still in invite-only alpha testing, so you’ll need to ask someone for an invite.

Tildes are not combined, so you can only register in one place. And he has another name for his communities: these are, of course, tildes. (The tilde is the “~” character, and on the old, old Internet, many personal web pages had a tilde at the beginning of their name, continuing an even earlier tradition .) On Tildes.net, every tilde can have tags, so there is ~health and it contains the “fitness” tag.

How to sign up for Tildes : Find someone with a Tildes account and ask for an invite.

Discord

Discord has nothing to do with Reddit: it’s a chat app similar to Slack (or, for the old ones among us, IRC ). But many Reddit communities had already dedicated Discord servers for people who wanted to casually chat with each other, and so during the shutdown, these communities relied more on their Discords.

Finding Discord to replace your favorite subreddit isn’t so much about recreating what was lost as it is about keeping track of the people you used to hang out with. Each Discord community is private – many are invite-only – and they decide who to let in and how the server works.

How to sign up for Discord : Find an invitation from the community you want to join. For a Discord associated with a subreddit, there is usually a link in the sidebar or in a post somewhere in the subreddit.