Just because Reddit does it rather badly does not mean that other OSS projects shouldn't try to do better.
>Just because Reddit does it rather badly
What about other OSS project? It's also not easy to make Linux from scratch. Being OSS doesn't mean it will be single click to run your instance.
Linux doesn't really have to since 99% of users use distributions, not LFS.
And there's a difference between gratuitous (or almost gratuitous) dependencies and must have ones. From what I read in the other comments Neo4J doesn't feel like a must-have for this project.
Plus, to be honest, Mongo, Neo4J, Redis AND Elastic Search? That's got to be overkill :)
The reddit repo doesn't have any commits since March. If that's their actual codebase, what are all their engineers doing?
It's not the actual codebase, it's kind of a branch that has to be manually updated (by cherry-picking across commits from the "real" one). It used to be kept in pretty close sync with the code live on the site, but it seems like they don't care about updating it any more. There are things that have been live on the site for close to a year now that aren't in the open-source repo.
Not really. Why? Reddit is opensource but it'd damn hard to setup correctly and start your own instance.