Discuit, the alternative to Reddit, is now open-source

Today, Discuit is taking a big step forward: All the code that powers the platform is now publicly available on Github. And, what is more, Discuit is now completely free and open-source software.

If this is the first time you're hearing about Discuit, we're a community platform—an alternative to Reddit—that launched a few months back during the API controversy of Reddit. We've been growing slowly ever since, and I'm happy to say that we're now home to a small but dedicated and awesome user base.

If you're tired of the repeated anti-consumer behavior of the major social platforms, and hate how Meta, Alphabet, Reddit, etc, all want to make you addicted to scrolling and suck up all your data, then come and join us and be a part of an attempt to create an alternative (and fun) space, free from all of that. Let us together fight the attention economy and the destruction of the internet commons!

Technology

The backend of Discuit is built in Go and the frontend is a React application; MariaDB is used as the main datastore, and Redis is used for transient data (sessions, caching, etc). I chose to build most things from the ground up without relying on a ton of external libraries and frameworks—well, aside from React—to keep things fun and interesting (just ignore the occasional partially built wheel, please).

If you'd rather jump in and start playing around, just clone the repository and follow the instructions in the README to set up a development environment on your local computer.

License

The Discuit codebase is licensed under AGPLv3. This is an important choice because this ensures that the code that runs Discuit will always remain free and open-source. And people can contribute with the guarantee that their work won't be made private in the future. And if anyone else launches a site using this codebase, the license requires that they make their additions and changes open-source as well.

The front-page of Discuit as of 30 November 2023.