Least Social is out of Alpha and looking for Beta users

Posted by West_Desert@reddit | RedditAlternatives | View on Reddit | 38 comments

Hi! I am the one of the admins of least.social, a new social site that we are bringing out of Alpha and want to open up to new beta users! For a full rundown, please view our help page here: https://least.social/help

Here are the bullet points:

- No ads or trackers: We’re community‑funded, not ad‑driven. No data harvesting, no dark patterns.

- Posts expire by default: Everything starts with a one‑week lifespan to keep the feed fresh and minimal.

- Voting = time control: Your upvote adds to post's lifespan, your downvote removes time from it. Influence scales with your profile score. If a majority of active users downvote, a post can be deleted instantly.

- Anonymous posting: Share without tying content to your profile. (Comments require accounts; posts can be anonymous.) Anonymous posts do not contribute to your profile score at all.

- Text-first, link-smart: Paste a link, we collapse it into a clean button (Text / Link / Pic / Gif / Video). Click to expand only when you want it, or set the site to auto-expand as you scroll.

- Hashtags & Groups: Browse by hashtags or create private Groups (custom hashtag sets) for focused, personal feeds.

- Content filters: Hide words, phrases, or domains you don’t want to see. Your feed, your rules.

- Simple following: Follow people you like; get a notification for their posts and birthdays.

- PWA (Progressive web-app) support: Install on your phone (no app store) and get push notifications. We may roll out official app store support in the future.

- Privacy by design: We practice digital minimalism—short‑lived posts, no surveillance economics, no data resale.

We welcome your feedback and support! We have room for 100 new users per month during the beta, but if that fills up quickly we will up that amount.

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RearAdmiralP@reddit

Nice site. I like the text-first approach. Using tags and configurable tag groups is a great way to organize content. Including posts and comments from the fediverse to seed the site is a good strategy to get it off the ground. Giving all posts a TTL and then using voting to extend or diminish the TTL is a clever application of the voting mechanic and a great way to keep the site running fast by reducing the size of the database.

A couple small suggestions--

Currently, clicking on a post on the feed opens it in a modal. It would be nice if there were an option to navigate to the post instead.
Currently, clicking on a tag on a post in the feed just opens the post in a modal. The tag badges look like they should be interactable, and I would expect that clicking a tag should add it to my current tag filter set. You may want to have a visual indication of whether a specific tag is in the current filter set or not, and clicking on one not in the set adds it while clicking on one that is in the set removes it.
A little bit of color might be nice. Something that I have found useful in my Reddit client is to assign colors to different authors based on hash of their username. All comments by the same author get that color in the background. It makes it easy to distinguish participants in threads from each other.
You'll notice that all these requests as UI related. The problem with UI design is that every asshole is going to have an opinion. It might be useful to to document your API so that you can say, "We're doing it our way. If you don't like it, here are the API docs, so you can go build your own UI!".

Overall great site. I would have posted this feedback there, but I didn't want to make an account, and, for some reason, an ephemeral post doesn't seem the right place for this kind of discussion.

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