Is a Reddit clone what we need?

Hosting costs are the easy one to point to.

Liability also gets there. If you host your own forums and fail to moderate it, you can be sure that illegal content will show up there. On reddit, if the mods fail to moderate illegal content Reddit will step in and shut it down - but a mod going on vacation for a week or two won't cause problems that failing to moderate/hosting such content on a forum would.

Reddit makes discovery much easier. Say if you like cat pictures and go to /r/cats - and then someone says "oh, what a nice black cat! But I can only see the eyes, post this in /r/eyesofthevoid too." Webrings (there's a term you haven't heard in a while) partly solve that problem, but in the context of forums only make reading easier. Each forum you'd have to sign up for again.

Let's talk about security too. The locally hosted forums had regular security problems. We were trusting whoever was hosting the forum to regularly keep phpForums up to date.

There's certainly an option to go host a forum. If you have a community that wants to move from Reddit to something else, go for it - be it a reddit clone or a forum. The thing to be aware of is that it is a lot more work to pay for, host, and manage than clicking "create community" on Reddit.

Largely, no. Community building is a slow and cumbersome process and Reddit already has critical mass of users and topics covered. You could clone it, offer more features/better support, but if the clone reached a similar scale it would simply encounter the same problems Reddit has.

Turns out community-building is really not a lucrative business, and beyond in-app/service purchases by some dedicated users, you are ultimately reliant on advertising as the largest and sole contributor to your customer lifetime value calculations.

It is very easy for an independent group to create adjacent apps on your service (i.e. Apollo) as they are separate from the economic realities of your business. i.e. Reddit needs to increase ad revenue, and may not priority the same features that Apollo does. Apollo delivered its service at someone's own personal expense (both time and money.) How can a company compete with something being done for free when they have to pay staff and other capital?

But this is the cycle of communities and, like Digg before it, and forums before that, there might be something new and engaging to sway a majority of users to leave. We're already seeing Reddit be aged-out with Discord... So if anything, people might just move there.

Really, its not a technology problem -- its a business problem.

1. No need to replace Reddit specifically. People just use whatever works for them.

2. Hosting forums can be very very very cumbersome. It takes lots of man-hour to operate a service and moderate the community on it.

3. Hosting is very cheap. What's better? A 1GbE/10GbE connection at home can host a moderately sized community.

Alternatives like Lemmy still have their limitations[0]

[0] https://raddle.me/f/lobby/155371/warning-lemmy-doesn-t-care-...

> Federated services have always had privacy issues but I expected Lemmy would have the fewest, but it's visibly worse for privacy than even Reddit.

> Deleted comments remain on the server but hidden to non-admins, the username remains visible

> Deleted account usernames remain visible too

> Anything remains visible on federated servers!

> When you delete your account, media does not get deleted on any server

> Since the operator and developer of lemmy has very problematic politics (defending genocide and homophobia for example), and is demonstrably incredibly hostile to non-authoritarians, giving him permanent access to your data (even if you delete your account) is a very bad idea.