Clusterrr - Platform with customizable moderation + EU hosting
Posted by lexsiga@reddit | RedditAlternatives | View on Reddit | 29 comments
We're launching a small project: clusterrr eu — a nested vote style platform made in Europe, with a few twists. It’s very early days (beta just went live), and we’re not here to claim we’ll replace Reddit or save the internet. But we are trying something a bit different:
- Communities can define their own rules, moderation logic, and voting systems.
- Standard - Up Down
- Democratic - Up only
- Weighted and Quandratic which are still being build but essentially one weights the expertise of users and quadratic will increase the vote cost overtime.
- We are building it on the idea of a trust score system that is still in the works to reduce noise and reward quality.
- It's centralized! — because we think accountability and regulation aren't a bug, but a feature of living in a society, together.
- We’re fully running on EU infra, no tracking beyond a local Plausible instance, and trying to keep it clean, usable, and small while it grows.
There are a few rough edges and bugs but we will take care of that in the coming weeks. If you're curious or just want to poke around, feel free. Feedback is welcome, brutal or otherwise. And if you hate it, totally fair — we’re just building.
NB: sorta fighting with auto filters to get this published. Anyone has an idea why?
threelonmusketeers@reddit
Given the history of ensh*ttification of Digg, Reddit, and Twitter, many people are increasingly wary of centralized platforms. What assurance can you provide users that your centralized platform is different?
lexsiga@reddit (OP)
It’s legally bound by European laws. Is perhaps the best pragmatic answer. We can’t just close and open a new instance of the service to avoid legal obligations. And that “free speech supremacy” philosophy doesn’t resonate as much over here.
My problem with decentralisation is mostly; who has a stake in making the platform better, work on it, dedicate staff, create jobs? Who has a stake in make it legally bound if I can just spin another serveur if anything goes south?
Are those unbreakable arguments? Maybe not, and I am not sure there are any. That’s just another experiment, we saw what was done in some parts of the world, we saw what worked, what didn’t and we think we can eventually do better 🤷♂️
LemmyDOTwtf@reddit
You could eventually just move the company and servers to avoid “legal obligations”.
Can you describe what decentralisation means to you, because I can’t make sense of your arguments against it.
lexsiga@reddit (OP)
I see where you want to go, and fair point — I’m not saying decentralization can’t work in theory. I’m saying it can end up with no one being really accountable for anything. If a server gets toxic or broken, people just move or spin up another one. That’s fine if that’s what you want, but it’s not what we’re building.
We’re centralised because we want to take responsibility for what we run. And built something ourselves. Doesn’t mean we’re perfect — just means if it goes to shit, it’s on us.
That’s it, really. Not trying to win a philosophy battle.
mighty3mperor@reddit
Now that is a feature, not a bug. Your best guardrail to protect against enshittification is decentralisation. If the users don't like the way things are going with the community on one instance, they vote with their feet, switch instances and carry on. If they don't like it on a centralised system then they can only leave and try and find somewhere else, which tends to lock people in.
Operating under EU law is nice but it doesn't come with finely-tuned safeguards, a lot of enshittification can happen without troubling legislators in Brussels.
lexsiga@reddit (OP)
Your view has merits. Honestly it also a choice of trying to build something that does not lead to it. I guess some people just want to try. We don’t have to wait for Brussels to make decisions, but we can work with the idea what we are not above regulations and not trying to avoid them.
And, well, since lemmy does exist. It’s always a legitimate option for users regardless.
LemmyDOTwtf@reddit
Lemmy is just one platform out of many, that uses ActivityPub to communicate. Why not build on top of that, have your own garden, but open to other platforms?
habarnam@reddit
You can't afford centralized.
DragonfruitOk2029@reddit
what do you mean? why not, whats your point? Curius =)
habarnam@reddit
Social media is attractive for users based on the "network effect", where there is already a large number of users present to interact with.
In a centralized service all of those users you have to own locally, and that brings a lot of scale issues that I suspect you, and your team, if you have one, are probably not prepared to deal with/pay for. Not to mention that you need to acquire these users in some way, which is not really simple.
In a decentralized service, any individual instance can use resources for the local users which are only a fraction of the total available network users. Therefore the scale is smaller but the network effect is the same, or even larger.
DragonfruitOk2029@reddit
Okey i am a programmer. But what do you mean? Websites dont work like torrents. First i thought you meant running a website on a home server, versus cloud. Now you speak of webbsites like reddit like torrents, so i dont get what you mean?
The rest about community making ofcourse i agree with. However one point is the platform itself. People not just want old content, they want a place to be free to make new content and have it seen without getting censored etc.
mighty3mperor@reddit
What they mean is: for a social network to be a success it needs a critical mass of people. On a centralised system this will take time to build and gets expensive quickly, as you are hosting everyone. On the Fediverse, for example, each instance has a fraction of the total users but has access to them so it is easy to acquire the necessary critical mass. So I could start a TikTok alternative on the Fediverse and, on day one, my instance would have a potentially large audience.
DragonfruitOk2029@reddit
So you mean like Lemmy, many small locally hosted communities in a big one? However they are not really connected like that on Lemmy im not sure, is there a place i can browse all Lemmy communities? Am i getting you right?
Im actually developing a new centralised system for this.
mighty3mperor@reddit
An instance's community page has "local" and "all" tabs, the latter shows you all the communities people on your instances are subscribed to. Or you can use Lemmy Explorer.
DragonfruitOk2029@reddit
Interesting is all lemmy communties visible there? I donjt get if there is 2 different lemmy servers. Can those host communties with the same name?
then how would you be able to browse all lemmy communties? When a lot have the same name.
mighty3mperor@reddit
The address system is like email, so your privacy communities would be:
!privacy@lemmy.ml !privacy@lemmy.world
And such like.
DragonfruitOk2029@reddit
I feel this is a flaw in a way. A flaw in the way one community will get to diversified into different smaller communities. Instead of staying in one place.
mighty3mperor@reddit
Not really, usually one or two prosper and the others fade away and get shuttered.
It has strengths:
So if you don't like the way a community is run, you can just use a different one and if it doesn't exist, you can start one.
That redundancy isn't a bug, it's a key feature and, like the initial ideas for the Net itself, it provides resilience.
lexsiga@reddit (OP)
Nothing is free. Passing the cost and efforts does not make it disappear.
Inside_Jolly@reddit
Why does nobody implement Down only voting?
> It's centralized! — because we think accountability and regulation aren't a bug, but a feature of living in a society, together.
Of course, it is. But by being centralized you're going to be regulated by the government and accountable to the advertisers (Uh... what's your business model btw?). Not the society.
lexsiga@reddit (OP)
I don’t mind toying with the idea of having a negative vote only community vote system later on.
And yes, we are accountable to the law where the company is incorporated: Stockholm Sweden. I know in parts of the words a dislike of the government is part of the culture, am French, we consider that healthy. However, consumer laws are fairly skewed towards consumers rights in Europe. And that’s the idea: we don’t want to be fantasising some hypothetical system outside of social norms that can be coerced by bots, external actors or false philosophies.
The law is ultimately what bounds societal discourse.
To be clear; advertising is not out of considerations and likely one of the first things we will attempt. What it won’t be however is embedded in similar fashion as fb/reddit/twitter (ie. In the user’s feed) as we believe it’s disingenuous.
In short: there is way to do advertising without pretending not to be an ad and without forcing user interactions with ads. But it requires a bit of work and we are not married to the idea.
Spirited_Seaweed7927@reddit
If it's in the EU I'll definitely have a look.
lexsiga@reddit (OP)
It is! Hosted on OVHCloud in France (or possible we picked a German server I don’t remember). We are not using any US-based service provider that manages or uses data.
Spirited_Seaweed7927@reddit
That's great. I had a look at the link and it looks promising. I will need to think of a username before signing up.
lexsiga@reddit (OP)
Appreciate it. bear in mind some capabilities are still bit rough round the edges. We are ironing out a few of the things. But it’s very actively being worked on :-)
Spirited_Seaweed7927@reddit
OK, cool.
UnflinchingSugartits@reddit
Is there an Android app?
lexsiga@reddit (OP)
Not yet. But apps are in the works
lexsiga@reddit (OP)
link here; https://clusterrr.eu/