Subreply – An open source text-only social network | Hacker News Reader

Subreply – An open source text-only social network

github.com

136 pointslcnmrn76 comments

For a new social network to thrive, it needs two things: content that interests users, and a distinct culture that keeps them engaged. Take the J programming language—I’ve been exploring it lately, but Reddit’s discussions are sparse (the first post I found was 16 years old). Niche topics often lack critical mass, and without it, platforms risk becoming ghost towns.

But beyond content, what sets a network apart is its style. Hacker News works because it rewards precision, logic, and staying on-topic. If Subreply wants to compete, it needs more than just "text-only"—it needs a clear ethos. Will it enforce an etiquette? Foster a specific tone? Otherwise, why would communities migrate?

Edited with help from deepseek.

I've seen so many forums where the pitch is that it's "like a subreddit or Hacker News but for X", where X is scientific papers, Go articles, OtherLang articles, etc.. and the only one that maintained at least some traffic is lobste.rs, all the others are ghost towns.

Cool! I'd say the current UI would greatly benefit from some UX enhancements.

At first glance, the page just looks like a wall of text. Very little contrast/hierarchy difference between author names and post titles etc so it's difficult to distinguish between what the content is. Spacing between content would help too.

I love the UI.

Me too, not all UIs need to have the spacing of a children's book with one sentence and an image per page.

While I agree with what we don't need, something is still off with the UI. I can't really put my finger on any specific problem, though. It's just a gut feeling.

The names are bold faced, so my attention is drawn to them, but since i don't recognize any of them, i don't even know where to start reading.

How is this open source? This is the license, in full:

· https://github.com/lucianmarin/subreply/blob/master/LICENSE

Gotta say that (1) images greatly improve engagement on things like Mastodon and Bluesky and (2) I have the most fun on those platforms sharing photos that I took.

But there are no images here

... hence the comment

I've been keeping a list of features to build into a HN browser extension for years now and this is one of the top items on my list. One of these days I'll get around to it.

I wasn't complaining. I love that HN is text only.

... and what I post to Mastodon/Bluesky is different from what I post to HN

https://mastodon.social/@UP8

For instance, I post links to phys.org a lot more and I'm less likely to post a link to the paper because (1) Mastodon can't extract images out of the latter and (2) I get more replies like "this is over my head" from Mastodonsters whereas I think most of you might think you'd look stupid if you said something like that. On the other hand I rarely post links to The Guardian to Mastodon because it can't extract images from Guardian articles.

Bonus: if you look right now you'll see the user interface that I use to post to HN! [1]

[1] permalink that documents the mysterious YOShInOn: https://mastodon.social/@UP8/114887102728039235

> I get more replies like "this is over my head" from Mastodonsters whereas I think most of you might think you'd look stupid if you said something like that.

Not sure that’s the reason. Or at least all of it. HN tends to value substantive posts and someone just saying “I don’t understand this” doesn’t add to the discussion and would likely be downvoted. On the other hand, I have seen people here say they don’t understand specific bits of a post. Those are actionable and advance the discussion, and tend to be upvoted and get replies.

Can you tell me more about your three sided cards?

Yeah, this reminds me of old Reddit where people resorted to imgur and other image hosts before they introduced their own photo upload feature.

Is that bad? Resorting to a dedicated party for rich content? I enjoyed reddit more when it was like that honestly. Business wise it is the wrong decision though.

It's bad in that the media is completely disconnected from the posts. If the media provider you chose goes down, nobody will be able to see the stuff you've posted anymore. If that subreply server you're using gets taken down, you'll have lots of orphaned stuff on that media upload website.

> If the media provider you chose goes down, nobody will be able to see the stuff you've posted anymore.

Imgur was started because the founder was annoyed at sites like ImageShack and Photobucket killing viral images and/or preventing hot linking. It was Reddit's official-unofficial image host until Reddit started hosting images themselves.

Imgur also rugpulled in the end, think it was adult content at first but didn't they recently delete a ton of old content and content not tied to accounts.

Ultimately you can never trust the parasite image upload service because eventually they'll try and supplant you like how imgur is now a reddit-like/ifunny-like type site instead of just a "dumb" image host.

I think you're right that Imgur went on a binge of deleting content not tied to registered accounts in the recent past. It's amusing Imgur went full circle, starting because they disliked inaccessible content and then making content inaccessible.

It's hopefully a lesson people learn that were too young to experience ImageShack/Photobucket's issues.

For discussions among technical people, it might not be bad! It works well on HN. Unfortunately, interfaces that developers love are often not appealing— maybe not even useable in some cases— for other users.

That you enjoyed it more when it didn't have a "native" image integration is probably unrelated to that fact but just that the site changed in a lot of other ways. How does the hostname where the image gets loaded from matter?

It matters when external images were not embedded into the page, but internal ones are. This leads to at least one (probably two, to go back) extra clicks per image.

I still love old Reddit

https://old.reddit.com/

It's what I use. Normal reddit is atrocious.

If someone from reddit is reading this:

If reddit can't admit to making a mistake with the redseign, just rename Old Reddit into...

Retro Reddit

... and spin that as a good thing.

Before Facebook bought Instagram, the later was the main way people posted images on Twitter, since it was text-only at the time.

I've never used Mastodon of Bluesky and I hate Twitter. I do feel pretty engaged with HN, and it is text-only. I'm not sure what makes "social media" different from a discussion board though, so I don't know whether HN counts. I do remember that github used to call itself social coding, which was one factor making me want to stay away from it.

HN has (or is missing, depending on your point of view) a number of features integral to (other?) social networks. Being text-only is one, but not having notifications for replies is a big one. Also no “boosts”, “reshares”, “follows”, “blocks”, …

Yeah for Usenet I use gnus, which keeps track of which posts I have already seen. It doesn't have notifications and I don't miss them, as long as I can see right away where the new posts are. I don't know what reshares are. Gnus does have a way to ignore specific posters or topics and I do use that. Every time I mull the idea of writing another forum poster, I come back to the realization that Usenet already does everything needed (at least on the backend), and has done so since the 1980s. A better NNTP to web gateway is all it could really use, for those who want to read with browsers.

For reply notifications, I use HN user ‘dangrossman’s HN Replies:

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dangrossman

Show HN: HN Replies – Get notified of replies to your comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11080539 - February 11 2016 (124 comments)

https://www.hnreplies.com/

In a very similar veign I've been working on a federated link aggregator for quite some time.

It's test instance https://brutalinks.tech is not open for new accounts but if anyone would be interested to run it for themselves I can help with setting it up. :)

Two clicks into this and I say someone posting "Killing n** (free speech)" from a poster named "N*** killer".

I am, in fact, pro free speech. But this is a bad look. I'm not even saying this is a problem with subreply. It is some other kind of problem. A problem with a subset of people who like free speech or something? I don't get it.

It's worth pointing out that the post in question was made in the past half hour amidst the wave of activity from HN. Not to say your point isn't valid, but I think this is more an example of trolls who will say anything and everything to cause anger and insult; it's not representative of those who believe in free speech, or the site itself for that matter.

Maybe it is a bot by other competing social networks.

Such trolling hurts new businesses a lot more than old ones.

Other social media platforms don't see this as competition, it's got 59 stars on GitHub. I don't think anyone is losing sleep about their silo being made irrelevant yet.

White supremacists hang out on "Hacker" News. They feel at home because the mods protect them, as long as they mask their commentary in polite language.

But that example has played out on every social media website, forum, etc once hitting critical mass. It's a bigger problem in society yes, but it's not just trolls. Trolls are the least harmful of the groups of people who will scream racial epithets online.

It's that HN is filled with racist dipshit clowns.

I posted a prototype of a real-time social network on HN many years ago and within minutes there were multiple posts exactly like that.

> I am, in fact, pro free speech.

You can be pro free speech and still not condone hate speech, or libel, or doxxing, or a myriad of other problems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech

Free speech doesn’t mean you can say literally anything in literally any context. Not, not even in the “land of the free”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_in_the_Unite...

Additionally, XKCD reminds:

https://xkcd.com/1357/

> A problem with a subset of people who like free speech or something? I don't get it.

I don’t think those people particularly care about free speech, they just want to be able to say whatever they want with no repercussions. The more of a “free speech absolutist” they claim to be, usually the worse they are. It’s a common pattern to see those same individuals clamour for free speech in one post and then in another call for banning books or try to silence someone else.

> want to be able to say whatever they want with no repercussions

Rather, they want to be able to say anything to annoy people as much as possible, for the kicks.

Verily, it's important to be able to say annoying things: try speaking about atheism or a different religion in a devout crowd (capitalism among the "left", climate change among the "right", etc). But the intention is important. The intention of trolls is to enjoy other people's discomfort, not to voice an important idea.

Unfortunately, this is very hard to formalize.

Trolls exist, but they’re far from the majority. The people who shout “go back to your country” to fellow countrymen of darker skin colour on the street aren’t trolls.

The extreme and persistent refusal of people en-masse over the years to concede to this, and to insist with absolute certainty that any amount of filtering at all is straight up censorship and so they're now being repressed, has successfully made me give up on the idea of being "pro free speech". I sometimes wonder if that was the goal, both in the political sense, but also in the sarcastic counterexample sense.

> It’s a common pattern to see those same individuals clamour for free speech in one post and then in another call for banning books or try to silence someone else.

But that's you, too:

> Free speech doesn’t mean you can say literally anything in literally any context.

It is of course different because they want to be free to say the bad thing and prevent others from saying the good thing, instead of the other way round like the true free speech advocates.

I think you’ll benefit from reading the Wikipedia links I posted. Your comment doesn’t make sense when you understand what free speech really means, and that curtains restrictions are a necessary, well-defined, and important part of it.

You might be more specific. Something about the paradox of tolerance, maybe?

But anyway, you admit that your idea of free speech has restrictions, and their idea of free speech also has restrictions, but the difference is that yours are the necessary ones, by your values. Their restrictions are the necessary ones by their values, but their values are bad and wrong. I'm only being slightly po-faced here, I think this description of the situation is probably literally true, barring mistakes and room for improvement in the good value system and the outside possibility of adherents of the bad value system being occasionally onto something insightful.

> But anyway, you admit that your idea of free speech has restrictions

That is exactly why you should read the links. It’s not my idea of free speech. You have no idea what my idea is, because what I showed you is the definition. I didn’t make those up, I linked to sources.

What you are doing is conflating someone who understands what free speech is—and that its definition and application everywhere includes restrictions—and someone who hypocritically claims to be a free speech “absolutist” (i.e. literally anything goes) but then tries to silence the speech of others.

Yes, but my point is, trying to silence the speech of others is part of free speech, and you and your sources have said so. So criticizing the absolutist for not being a consistent absolutist, when you don't even believe in any simple consistent rule, is petty.

There probably is a very general consistent rule to your/your source's idea of free speech, like "everybody's liberties should be curtailed only where they endanger the liberties of others". But implementing this leaves enormous scope for arbitrary and creative judgments. We can assume that your opponents, being wrong, have less internally consistent ideas, but even so the presence of exceptions in itself is nothing to be critical about if your own conception of free speech is nuanced. They may be following some logic too.

> Yes, but my point is, trying to silence the speech of others is part of free speech, and you and your sources have said so. So criticizing the absolutist for not being a consistent absolutist, when you don't even believe in any simple consistent rule, is petty.

What bananas sophistry is this? All this person is saying is that contemporarily free speech absolutists tend to be hypocrites. Surely you aren't arguing that those supporting any limit on speech can't call out hypocrisy amongst free speech absolutists. Wouldn't this also be you limiting their speech? Are we incepting deeper and deeper into some kind of ironic morass of hypocrisy?

For some people if you can say the most extreme things, then you can say anything else, including things that are nowhere near as bad as this but are banned in other platforms.

I have admined what I consider free speech friendly communities in the past (think forums), people always join and ruin it for everyone else.

When your speech has no apparent consequences people tend to say the most obscene things because in their mind it’s been taboo for so long. The problem is that is an extreme dopamine rush and if not checked, can cause you to seek that reward by opening your mouth a second time. (Or typing your thoughts on social media).

It is a bad look, but it makes sense to me.

For what it's worth, right now at least, most thoughts and opinions people have in the English speaking world can be expressed just fine without it getting moderated out, despite what some would claim. And so those who seek out platforms where they won't get moderated will primarily be folks who would get otherwise moderated out elsewhere. One can also refer to cryptocurrencies and Tor for a parallel.

We see much worse than that all the time. We go to movies that portray horror, torture, murder, depravity, slavery, etc. There are books that contain all those. There are tattoos on people that depict scenes of death and satanism. We put these in their proper place and tolerate them, many people even enjoy them. There are some efforts to keep them out of the public eye and away from children, but it's quite easy to see incidental advertisements, posters, or discussions of all of them.

We should treat social media the same way. There should be a way to filter what you don't want to see, that's your choice. But we shouldn't try to stamp out people saying what they want, or decide what other people should filter for themselves.

Most people who say things like you quoted, aren't killers, i'd guess that most of them aren't even racist. A good fraction of them are just immature, or social outcasts, that are desperate to get a rise out of people. If we could all turn down our reactivity, there'd be less of a draw, for those troublemakers to spew their nonsense.

What we should be the most on guard against, are the unintended consequences of trying to censor this stuff. People shouldn't have their political and social voices limited, just because a relatively few people are disruptive like this.

> There should be a way to filter what you don't want to see, that's your choice. But we shouldn't try to stamp out people saying what they want

The point of choosing abusive usernames and posting abusive things is to hurt people who don’t want to see that stuff. The two cannot coexist in the same space. There’s no reason to legitimise this kind of thing while they are looking for ways to hurt people.

I used `Kizmiaz` as a (gaming) username at some point in time and let my pre-pubescence self run wild on that account.

Finally! I asked about open sourcing it almost 10 years ago: https://subreply.com/reply/11842

And yet, it is still not open source :)

Trendiest post is from the developer saying "Mastodon is dead", four weeks ago, 12 replies.

Sure bud.

You make it sound like they claim subreply is the thing that might have killed mastodon. The full post is:

Mastodon is dead. Most people have migrated to Bluesky or Threads.

Thank you for the context. It’s important and often overlooked.

...and completely wrong, as evidenced by simply googling the words "fediverse stats", which will show you no meaningful change one way or the other.

Most of their other posts on the front page also aren’t exactly charismatic (or plain childish). A good early warning sign to stay away from that place!

You probably want to pin requirements to specific versions of the libraries.

Was going to register but this stopped me...

"Password needs a lowercase letter"

Can you use entropy based password complexity measures please.

Can you give some pointers to some popular implementations or algorithms in any language, please?

Is there some "industry standard" or "best practice" for such a metric?

I guess Bitwarden might have something publicly available...

I have thought about making something similar, text only social media. The focus should be on written content, not so much video, and images. I also considered how to monetize / do ads correctly, maybe a slightly different font.

Can you talk about the timeline algorithm? Which posts are getting boosted?

> text only > emojis

UTF-8 is still text :p

Previously known as Sublevel and Superthread.

missed the good old days of telnet bbs & newsgroup :)

Yeah I like this a lot. I’ll Be signing up. I haven’t logged into mastodon in ages. And threads. Meh. I’m left enough I don’t need an echo chamber to validate my (correct ;-)) way of thinking.

I would love for everyone designing a new social app to start by deciding how to handle the issues every social app will have. Abuse, hate speech, brigading, etc. We've known about these for decades. They can't be ignored. I'm not dictating how they should be handled (variety is great!) but decisions should be made and declared up front before the first spec or line of code. Otherwise the app is DOA IMHO.

I’ve become increasingly convinced that the two main negative metrics for social media are spam and spite. But people only tend to focus on the spam and only act on spite when it tips into abuse. If we put the same amount of effort into spite as we did spam, the difference would be immense and social media would be far healthier.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com