There are dozens of Reddit clones, many have come and gone. In my eyes they don't work because they aren't novel or innovative. There's no reason to switch for the average user.

No, but they are now rapidly making reasons for users to move.

There is years and years and years of amazing content and community on Reddit. Rallying people around a replacement looks challenging. I am hopeful that it happens.

Lemmy is pretty good, and is working towards full activitypub federation:

https://join-lemmy.org/

As for the usage.. there's some, but it is niche. The average user just won't move unless something goes from so-so-satisfactory to offensive. This is how mastodon got its (seemingly brief) user spike.

Lemmy's community is one of the worst I've seen. I'd stay away.

I’m not familiar with it. What’s bad about it?

I would have agreed in the past, but try it again now

It's mostly the user base.

An idea: Twitter has lots of users, maybe Elon could build Reddit-like features into it.

Internally Twitter was trying to figure this out for awhile. Before Elon

Would love to read/learn more about this.

I've written three of them. It's not technically difficult, but good luck getting people to actually use it (and if you do, you may end up with a userbase worse than 4chan).

There have been many redit clones.

And they've been about as successful as Google plus.

It's indeed the community.

The clones that drew the most attention all ended up becoming right-wing cesspools. I remember they were often created because of free-speech absolutism which was code for "I want to express hateful views without consequence".

You nailed it

Whatever happened to voat?

I think one problem people here underestimate is the cost of running the required infra. I seem to remember voat fell under it's own weight?

Voat was hijacked by neonazi communities that used bots to massively pre-register popular community names and effectively prevent anyone outside of their circle from using the site. It also was absolutely full of tech issues and spent at least a quarter of its first few years down.

One could argue that, from the point-of-view of a reader, Reddit is a clone of Usenet, or Fido, or BBSes. Not the back-ends, of course, but the UIs, the organic growth of communities, the community spirit that often develops, the meta-arguments about policies, moderation, moderators.

If someone makes a new usenet I can die happy. Honestly hoping for reddit to crumble, I'd have a lot more time each day to spend on useful things

I'd like to see the 3rd party app developers collaborate to build a reddit clone. They got a good user based combined.

If you think about Reddit as each of its subreddits being little islands, each island has a timeline of user posts, each post has a tree of comments, and there are moderators who enforce the rules of that island.

To me that starts to sound a lot like each subreddit could be replicated as an instance of something like Mastodon, and you're really only some kind of shared user database away from being able to make something that functions exactly like Reddit, but without any corporate control.

The problem with that is that you need to spend money to either host your own instance or pay someone else to do it for you. Most people are tech-illiterate and do not want to pay to host something which doesnt even reach the threshold to be a "hobby"

You just reinvented lemmy

When you create an alternative to big tech sites, you end up with the people who can't or won't use big tech sites. It's usually the former, and they suck. You get Nazis, commies, anarchists, and all the sorts of people whose posts you don't want to see between memes and cute animal pictures. It takes effort to prevent these people from taking over your website and driving away the normies.

Either you have a free for all with no moderation that will be toxic to the mainstream and impossible to monetize or you end up with Reddit again.

I think you quite underestimate how large Reddit community is. It became "the default community" for most topics.

I wouldn’t go that far. Often there’s a bigger and/or better community elsewhere, but the Reddit one is also passable because so many people are on Reddit.