If you haven’t heard the news, Reddit is making some drastic, user-hostile changes. This is essentially the final stage of any ad-supported and VC-funded platform’s inevitable march towards enshittification.

I really love the /r/rust community. As a community manager it’s my main portal into the latest happenings of the Rust ecosystem from a high-level point of view primarily focused on project updates rather than technical discourse. This is the only Reddit community I engage directly with; my daily fix of the Reddit frontpage happens strictly via login-less browsing on Apollo, which will soon come to an abrupt end.

This moment in time presents a unique opportunity for this space to claim its independence as a wholly community-owned operation. If the moderators and other stakeholders of /r/rust are already discussing possible next moves somewhere, please point other willing contributors like myself in the right direction.

I’m ready to tag along with any post-Reddit initiative set forth by the community leaders of this sub-reddit. Meanwhile, I’ve started mobilizing willing stakeholders from the fediverse, which I believe to be the path forward for a viable Reddit alternative.

Soft-forking Lemmy

Lemmy as an organisation has issues. But the Lemmy software is a fully functional alternative to Reddit that runs on top of the open ActivityPub protocol, and it’s written in Rust.

Discourse, the software which the Rust Users/Internals forum runs on also supports basic ActivityPub federation now, so the Rust Users forum could actually federate with one or more Lemmy-powered instances. As such, this wouldn’t just be a replacement to Reddit, it would be a significant improvement, bringing more cohesion to the Rust community

Given Lemmy’s controversial culture, I think it’s safest to approach it with a soft-fork mindset. But the degree to which any divergence will actually happen in the code comes down to how amenable the Lemmy team is to upstream changes. I’d love for this to be an exercise in building bridges rather than moats. I know the Lemmy devs occasionally peruse this space, so please feel free to reach out to me.

Here’s what’s happening:

• The author of Kitsune is attempting to run Lemmy on Shuttle, which in turn have expressed interest in supporting this alt-Reddit initiative.
• We’re also looking into OIDC/OAuth for Lemmy, which would allow people to log in with their Reddit/GitHub accounts. If anyone would like to take this on, let us know!
• Hachyderm is starting to evaluate Lemmy hosting next week. I personally think they could provide an excellent default home for a renewed /r/rust, as they are already a heavily Rust-leaning community of practitioners.

To facilitate this mobilization, I’ve set up a temporary Discord server:

https://discord.gg/ZBegGQ5K9w

I’ll gladly replace this with e.g. a dedicated channel on the Rust community discord. One big upside of having our own server is that we can bridge it to a self-hosted instance of Revolt, which we’ll do in the next few days.

Lemme know if this resonates with you!

— u/erlend_sh