I've been checking out some of the reddit alternative software as of late, not so much the many different servers and communities around. Ones I've liked:
Those all (are supposed to) federate. I don't think federation in these communities is always ideal, drive by posting and what not, I think a better approach would be a client that can read your followed stuff from a local list. But some non-federating options are:
There are lots more, some are great some not. There have been quite a few posted on this site in recent days. Some communities really just need forums or wikis, link aggregation and content voting aren't really always necessary.
I do believe communities should host their own sites. Some communities just don't have the interest to be viable long term, and Reddit was a way to externalize cost so that non viable communities can continue to exist. We see the results of that now, a company that isn't profitable due to bearing costs that nobody else is willing to bear squeezing users to try to stay afloat. This was always a temporary state of affairs. If you can't find a single community member dedicated enough to keep a VPS running, or with large communities, you can't scrounge up enough money from donations or whatever to keep the server running, that community simply isn't viable.
Kbin https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core
Lotide https://sr.ht/~vpzom/lotide
Lemmy https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy
Brutalinks https://sr.ht/~mariusor/brutalinks/
Those all (are supposed to) federate. I don't think federation in these communities is always ideal, drive by posting and what not, I think a better approach would be a client that can read your followed stuff from a local list. But some non-federating options are:
StackerNews https://github.com/stackernews/stacker.news
Comment Castles https://github.com/ferg1e/comment-castles
freedit https://github.com/freedit-org/freedit
There are lots more, some are great some not. There have been quite a few posted on this site in recent days. Some communities really just need forums or wikis, link aggregation and content voting aren't really always necessary.
I do believe communities should host their own sites. Some communities just don't have the interest to be viable long term, and Reddit was a way to externalize cost so that non viable communities can continue to exist. We see the results of that now, a company that isn't profitable due to bearing costs that nobody else is willing to bear squeezing users to try to stay afloat. This was always a temporary state of affairs. If you can't find a single community member dedicated enough to keep a VPS running, or with large communities, you can't scrounge up enough money from donations or whatever to keep the server running, that community simply isn't viable.