this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2024

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You guys should check out the reddit clone I've been working on (matrix.gvid.tv)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by x0x7 to c/technology

53 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

https://matrix.gvid.tv

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[–] [email protected] 66 points 9 months ago (1 children)

you might wanna name it something different than Matrix, a decentralised messaging protocol.

[–] x0x7 6 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (4 children)

I know. Around the time I did the first bout of development on it, Matrix decided they were going to become Element which was going to free up the name. They decided to keep both. I'm at a loss for a good name that describes that posts have position. That the posts exist in a matrix makes sense to me. I have plans to run a poll on a name change. I know I could always do something completely random. Like Lemmy. That doesn't tell you what it does at all. But my particular brand of creativity makes me want to name things functionally. And Matrix is just so freaking perfect for what it is. All the other similar options are way too nerdy. Latent, vector. I just need to get down with the truly random.

Ideas would actually be super helpful.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 9 months ago

Matrix is the messaging protocol. Element is the chat app built on the Matrix protocol. It was originally named RIOT.IM. They changed the messengers name from Riot to Element, the name Matrix was never going to be changed, mostly because those are separate things. They dropped the name to avoid litigation from Riot Games.

Matrix is a framework that has multiple chat applications, Element was just one of them.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago (1 children)

That’s not right Matrix was never going to become Element.

[–] x0x7 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Well I screwed up. The other reason why I didn't worry too much about it is at one stage it was just an internal project name and I just kept working on it, to the point that I think it's worth sharing. Yeah, figuring out the right name for it is a step I should do quickly.

[–] Ghostalmedia 7 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Call it Downie Upers

[–] x0x7 0 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Ok. That will be a candidate for the name change.

[–] INeedMana 6 points 9 months ago

"updoot"

Clear what you're referencing, IMO flows nicely and AFAIK (IANAL) isn't a trademark

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Linked List Array Node Key Value Pair Attribute

[–] AFKBRBChocolate 41 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[+] x0x7 -6 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (3 children)

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.

[–] cobysev 26 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] essteeyou 2 points 9 months ago

Just wait. ;-)

[–] abhibeckert -1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Reddit is not a “big corporation”.

How big is big? They’re working on a 6.5 billion dollar valuation. Sure, that’s not S&P 500, but that’s not your mom and pop coffee shop.

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/01/reddit-seeking-a-valuation-of-up-to-6point5-billion-in-ipo.html

[–] [email protected] 33 points 9 months ago (12 children)

Too much far right content. You can't have that stuff on there.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

It would be honestly more helpful if you posted a link to this "far right content" as proof of your point.

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[–] FartsWithAnAccent 29 points 9 months ago

Why is it called Matrix when Matrix is already a decentralized chat?

[–] [email protected] 26 points 9 months ago (6 children)

Yet another far right conspiracy dump, just with a more garbage layout and design than anything else.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I'm always interested in looking into alternative social media networks ... especially decentralized ones that are more open - open to everything (without devolving into extremist communities) and also open source

It would be nice to know what the background on your project is ... is it open source? is it a team of people? is it just you?

What are your metrics and stats? .. How many users are on there so far? .. How do you sign up and are there any restrictions?

Also, how is it moderated? .. or is it moderated?

And if it has no restrictions or moderation ... it's not a big deal when the community is small but over time as the numbers grow, moderation of some sort is necessary or the whole thing will just devolve into a mess.

Also, in this day in age, everyone is a lot more skeptical of one another ... so an important question for me is ... who are you? what is your background? where are you from? .... (and obviously, I don't mean for you to completely dox yourself but just to give a general idea of who you are as a person and a bit of your history)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Wait, what? A user posts a thing to a server, and that thing isn't then duplicated to 50 other servers ... yeah, I don't see how that can work.

(I'm just kidding - your site looks neat.)

[–] x0x7 1 points 9 months ago

Thanks

[–] [email protected] -1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

You know that happens with centralised sites too, right? It's invisible because all the redundant servers are behind the same domain name.

Edit: I think I missed the joke, sorry everyone.

[–] essteeyou 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I don't think they were talking about actual physical hardware.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Large centralised systems have international mirrors, you know that right?

And even if they were somehow all in the same building, that wouldn't be a good thing. Redundancy makes a service robust, and copying data isn't exactly difficult.

[–] essteeyou 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

I'm commenting under the impression that the guy was talking about the fact that the system is not federated, not that he was talking about physical hardware.

For what it's worth, I'm a senior developer who spent 8 years at Amazon partially working on developing and scaling systems that received millions of requests per day.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Yeah, I'm assuming that too. Although on my first reading they appeared to be making fun of the way the fediverse does things, on my second reading I think they might be making fun of how people talk about the fediverse, in which case my response wasn't appropriate. Oh well ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

So this is centralized?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

Oh my, jQuery!

[–] warmaster 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Great work, congrats. The UI needs serious work though.

[–] reflectedodds 2 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] FanciestPants 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] abhibeckert 7 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

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.

[–] Krafting 2 points 9 months ago

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!

[–] Asudox 1 points 9 months ago

What does "Display chan style" do?

[–] aj0828 1 points 9 months ago

Thinking about making a Reddit clone myself…

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