Awesome, thanks for doing the roundtable, that's a fantastic idea. Let me show you what we're about.

What we are currently building:

Mirage is what Reddit could have been if it had not sold out.

A place for real discourse, where users are not trapped inside one company’s database, one moderator class, or one set of shifting political boundaries. It looks and feels close enough to be instantly familiar, but the structure underneath is completely different. Your account is yours. Your social graph is yours. A node can refuse to show something on that node, but it does not get to erase you from the network. Moderation exists, but it is voluntary and composable. You choose which filters to apply and which curators to trust.

We just created an explainer video that gives a decent introduction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOvP32ihQ0M - we'd love for you to have a look. Let us know what you think!

Where it is at right now:

Mirage is live and fully usable right now. People can get on it, post, comment, and actually experience the product instead of reading promises about it. As of right now we had 161 active users in the last 24h making 424 posts/comments, and many more lurkers (a total of 1,796 users). We have 14,019 posts, 45,441 comments and 118,108 votes registered since we started a few months ago. We're growing very rapidly.

Everything is live and working smoothly. The underlying blockchain has never stopped since it went live. Everything is fully functional. We are now in the phase of pushing it forward, tightening the experience, expanding the network, and continuing to build aggressively in the open. Mirage is also fully open source at on github too, and development is very active, around 500 commits per month.

A lot of people asked for the old reddit theme, so one of our users added that recently - and you can activate it seamlessly. Here are some images: https://imgur.com/a/PuaL8u2 (just go to your settings and enabled it trivially). So if that's what you've been missing, or if you don't like the current UI, then just switch to that, or create your own theme, or create your own node. You can even run it completely locally with npm and a single script that we already provide. It's really that easy!

Biggest challenge:

Probably explaining, over and over, that Mirage is not some crypto bro project. People hear “blockchain” or “token” and immediately assume scam, speculation, or pump-and-dump nonsense. In our case, blockchain is there because real decentralization needs real decentralized infrastructure. Otherwise it is just marketing.

And Mirage, the in-platform currency, is not some tradeable shitcoin, but rather it is similar to "karma" on Reddit, but it has actual use. You earn it by participating, then use it for actual platform features, like longer posts, awards, and other benefits. For instance it stops people from squatting on names! You have to have at least 100k Mirage earned so that you can remove the "Anon-" prefix from your name - which then permanently seals your name. That's one of the issues that Digg was facing.

Anyways, a lot of the challenge is just getting people to understand that the crypto part is not the point. It is infrastructure. It is there because that is what makes the system actually decentralized.

Feature we are most excited about:

Moderation by choice. That is one of the deepest differences in Mirage. On normal platforms, moderation becomes a power structure. A small group decides what is acceptable, what gets buried, what gets pushed, and who gets disappeared. Mirage splits moderation from content hosting. Users can subscribe to different bots, filters, and trust layers instead of living under one universal regime. That is a much saner model, because large groups of people are never going to agree on one single standard for speech, culture, politics, or acceptable boundaries.

Mirage also does not have protocol-level banning. No admin, mod, or platform operator gets a universal delete button over users or communities. You can enable moderation agents like AntiSpamBot, add other agents that shape your experience (e.g. like on X you can just leave a comment with @FactCheckBot if you have that enabled), or build your own, but none of them get to erase people from the network itself.

And because Mirage is decentralized, it is censorship-proof by design. There is no single point to choke off, and every new node makes the network stronger.

How does it differ from lemmy/piefed/random federated platform:

Lemmy decentralizes hosting. Mirage decentralizes power over the user.

On Lemmy, your account lives on an instance, admins can ban users from the entire instance, mods can ban users from communities, instances can block each other, and admins can even federate site bans and purge content. That is better than Reddit, but it is still the same basic power structure with more than one server.

Mirage goes after the part Lemmy leaves intact. No protocol-level banning. No universal delete button over users. Moderation is opt-in, via agents you choose, like AntiSpamBot and others, instead of one admin stack ruling everyone by default. And because the network itself is decentralized, it is censorship-proof by design, not just “less centralized.” More nodes do not just spread hosting, they harden the network itself.

Final words: Lastly, we are seeing a lot of real organic activity from many of you who switched over, and we really appreciate every one of you. We are seeing a lot of genuinely strong organic activity, and that has us very excited! And yes, there are bots and low quality content too, and if that bothers you, enable the AntiSpamBot agent (or build your own). That immediately gives you a much cleaner and more solid version of the Mirage experience, exactly the way this system was designed to work.

Let us know if you have any questions and HAPPY GOOD FRIDAY y'all 🤟♥️