Title: Hi HN, this is a platform (Discuit, pronounced &quot;diskette&quot;) I&#x27;ve been working on for about two years. I initially built it for a niche demographic (my native country). But now with Reddit going dark and people looking for a new place to migrate to, I&#x27;m doing a quick launch today.<p>A few quick things:<p>1. I don&#x27;t believe federated platforms will ever become mainstream. They have a whole host of problems, not the least of which is that they&#x27;re too complicated for most people to use. This platform is not, therefore, federated.<p>2. I don&#x27;t know what the best way of monetizing a thing like this is. I see only two options: the Wikipedia model of running on donations, or being advertising supported (along with a paid ad-free tier). The Wikipedia model works quite well for small-scale and bandwidth light projects, but I don&#x27;t think a large social media platform can ever be funded that way.<p>3. Whichever option of monetization I take (if this takes off, that is) what I can say with certainty is that this will not go down the path of previous platforms. I don&#x27;t believe the SV grow-fast model has worked very well for the end users. I have no interest in chasing growth for its own sake, or in chasing valuations, or in capturing as much attention from the users as possible. On this platform, therefore, there <i>never</i> will be any dark UI patterns. Avoiding enshittification is a primary goal of mine.<p>4. My vision for this platform, and for social media in general, is about giving users agency; the freedom to choose their social experience to their liking. What this would mean in practice are things like: ability to customize the UI; ability to filter content as one wants; ability to tweak recommendation algorithms; ability to turn on and off things like infinite scroll and suggested posts; and so on. I hate how all the current platforms want to tightly control my experience for me.<p>I go into all this in a bit more detail in my introductory blog post: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discuit.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;introducing-discuit" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discuit.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;introducing-discuit</a><p>I know many HN users hate the New Reddit layout, which is what I&#x27;ve based this site on, but don&#x27;t be bothered by it too much, I will be adding a much more compact layout sometime later.
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