Yet another reddit clone... but with a couple of twists.

-> https://www.psephos.cc/

Psephos (Ancient Greek: ψῆφος, romanized: psêphos; plural: psephoi, ψῆφοι) was a ballot used by jurors (dikastai) in the law courts of ancient Athens to cast a secret ballot.

Decentralized moderation

Reddit and many clones have the issue that moderation is mainly handled by a couple of unpaid volunteers. This creates two problems: the mods have too much arbitrary power, but at the same time they have too much work.

With small power comes low responsibility

To address this issue we tried a decentralized, jury-based moderation system. The site has site-wide rules and board (subs) specific ones. When reporting content the rule that was infringed has to be selected, if enough (n=1 currently) reports are made a jury of users is randomly selected to judge the case. To handle egregious cases rapidly board's admins can fast-track moderation, but the user can contest which will result in a jury being selected as in the "slow" path. In theory this system should scale better and avoid some of the issues with the "mod-king" model of reddit, but whether this actually works in practice remains to be seen.

Media views

Another issue with reddit is that e.g. images often take over text content, due to their mass appeal to our weak-willed human brains. For example the r/photography allows only text posts, as it would otherwise be overrun by images. But isn't it a bit ironic for a photography sub not to allow photographs? To solve this we introduced different views of a board: all / text / images / videos. That way different types of posts can coexist without cannibalizing each other.

No BS?

No ads, no tracking, no google, no AI, open-source (eventually), global-first ("news" is not about the USA), etc.

Give it a try

https://www.psephos.cc/

I've disabled email verification, so making an account should be easy.

FAQ

• Federated ? No, I'm not sure how that would work with moderation.
• Mobile app ? No.
• Economic model? Donation-based / non-profit (eventually)
• Bots ? No magic solution besides standard practices, but I think it's a big problem that will need some institutional solution (some form of privacy-respecting ID system)