Reactionary Software / Needed by fschmidt

FreedIt - A Reddit Alternative

This is currently under development, see the FreedIt wiki.

The Idea

The idea of FreedIt is to be a distributed free-speech alternative to Reddit. Unlike everything else described on this site, the users of FreedIt would not be programmers but would rather be regular people, most likely from mainstream culture. So to explain the market for FreedIt, I must first explain some cultural and political issues.

All members of modern culture, without exception, are scum - purely vile and evil, devoid of any redeeming qualities. For convenience, I will simply refer to these people as "modern scum". If any modern scum are programmers, then they will naturally be modern programmers, and so this Reactionary Software website is not targeted at them. All reactionary programmers will be from outside of modern culture, so this site generally doesn't have to concern itself with modern scum. But in the case of a general-use program like FreedIt, I must consider the mass market.

Free speech, being a virtue, holds no fundamental appeal for modern scum. But modern scum have a long-standing civil war between its Left and its Right. Whichever is in power suppresses the speech of the other side. Whichever is out of power supports free speech only out of self-interest. When the Right was in power, the Left supported free speech. Now the Left is in power, so the Right supports free speech.

Among modern scum, the only intelligent people are the sociopathic global elite. Everyone else are morons. The elite are currently aligned with the Left, which means that there are no intelligent people on the Right. And this means that there is no one on the Right who can effectively get things done. So the big websites are controlled by the Left. The Right would like to create alternatives, but they are just too stupid to do so.

So now I can explain the market. Effectively the market for FreedIt is the Right-wing of modern scum who have no tolerable alternative to Reddit where they can post freely. All existing alternatives that I know of don't fully have free speech, so some elements of the Right can't speak freely. And all alternatives are technically just garbage, barely even usable. So FreedIt, as a technically sound fully free speech alternative, should be able to dominate the market of the Right.

There is one other issue that should be addressed. While the Left is mostly a uniform herd of morons, the Right does contain divisions. The extremist Right offends the moderate Right. This must be addressed to appeal to all parties. I posted a solution to this issue here.

If FreedIt works as planned, it should easily be able to generate enough revenue to support the developer. To build the user base, advertise to the Right. Since FreedIt will be so obviously superior to other alternatives, it should grow with such advertising. Once there is a decent user base, I suggest starting with crowdfunding to generate revenue. This should work if well promoted.

I explained how FreedIt could be successful, but why is it needed by reactionary programmers? Because reactionary programmers need forums to discuss programming and need support forums for their software. These forums should be on a social forum platform like Reddit so that other people can find them. And this platform should have free speech so that reactionary programmer won't be banned. This is why reactionary programmers need FreedIt.

The Implementation

I had the basic idea for FreedIt for a long time. Before describing my current suggested implementation, I will describe my prior attempts.

Attempt 1 - Blasma

I wrote a page describing my original thoughts on Blasma and later posted my updated thoughts on SaidIt. The basic idea was to have a distributed Luan program with a flexible architecture that allows adding modules and having different views/templates. At one point I even offered to pay for someone to do this. I never got any volunteers, so this died.

Attempt 2 - SaidIt clone

I chose the name "FreedIt" when I thought of using a clone of the SaitIt code to implement a free speech alternative. This would not have been decentralized, but my reasoning was that it should at least be easy to implement. This is where I was wrong. You can read about FreedIt in /s/FreedIt. The SaidIt code is in Python, so I found a Python programmer who was willing to try to work with the SaidIt code. And he did try, but in the end it just proved to be too difficult to work with. After all, it is modern software.

Attempt 3 - Now

I like the name FreedIt but I want to return to something closer to the Blasma idea. The difference is that I want to avoid over-engineering this, so no flexible architecture. Just implement one simple UI, whatever the programmer likes best, in Luan. One instance of FreedIt would only support one forum, or "sub" in Reddit-speak. This should make FreedIt a relatively simple program. The social aspects will be handled by the distributed code. This distributed code will be more challenging and I can help with this code.

So now the question is whether any programmer will actually do this project. This is the only one of the projects suggested on this site that can actually make money, so that may motivate someone. Anyway, I have done my part by writing this page, and now I will just wait and see.