Comsta.net, a Reddit alternative that's easy to use

by rajtilakjee • 3 years ago

5 3 3 years ago

Comsta.net is a platform where you can join and participate in communities you are interested in.

Hey hey, I hope y’all doing great. So my friend and I have been working on this platform for about a month (I’m a designer and he’s a web developer) and today it launches; hopefully just in time for anyone wishing to leave Reddit on June 30th.

[WHY THIS ALTERNATIVE?] "It's just one "Reddit alternative" after another that doesn't work anything like Reddit." This seems to be the most commonly mentioned comment that we’ve come across about other alternatives out there after lurking on this sub for a few months, as a lot of them don’t have the ease of access for the average non-techie user. And that’s why we created Comsta, aiming to provide a familiar environment, “a full Reddit alternative” without someone like u/spez, hence the Reddit-like UI and a lot more…

[FEATURES] - Modern, Reddit-like UI, as well as the option of a compact, old-Reddit-style version (Card/Compact view) - No sign-up required to view content. - No email required for sign-up either. - User-created communities (create one just by clicking a button, like how it is on Reddit) - NSFW content, NSFW communities will be allowed next week (since “the technology just isn’t there yet”, but seriously we will have NSFW tags, filters… by July 7th) - Dark/Light theme. - Show image/video on mouseover (oh you will love this little feature when browsing in Compact view) - Be able to upload images directly (meaning you don’t have to go somewhere else like ‘Imgur’ to upload an image first to then include it via link) - Make posts with multiple images (up to 5 pics at the moment)

Coming soon

- Nested comment: Will be available this weekend, can’t be a true Reddit alternative without this. - Rich Text Editor - Notifications - Polls - Re-designed mobile web version: Both of us are hardcore Apollo users so we’ll try our best to reproduce its UI as much as possible (e.g upvote/downvote buttons placed in the lower right corner of post, instead of what we have atm; and proper formatting on messages to name a few). Ideally, a dedicated app would be great as apps can support features that mobile browsers just can't make it work, but we’ll will on that later.

[BUSINESS MODEL] We’re leaning towards crowdfunding and donations, such as via Patreon. Self-hosting media is quite expensive as we have self-hosted images (as stated above in the Features section), and it would scale badly as more users joined. The costs wouldn’t be an issue with just a few thousand active users, but with much more than that, then we hope to have financial support from the community.

[SOME THOUGHTS] - We're just two friends and only one of us can code, so the site might be a bit buggy at the moment, please bear with us. - Seeing what happened to Reddit, we'll be upfront about our monetization approach and will have polls for the community to vote on regarding significant matters. - We hope Comsta could become “something” in your day-to day that replaces Reddit for you, though that's a long way to go. So please Come, Stay with us - that's what Comsta is really short for, not “Communications Station” as some might guess :)

We'd appreciate if you’d check it out at Comsta.net Thank you for giving us a chance.

creesch• 3 years ago

My first impression isn't all that good.

- I see a lot of elements loading with no content for several seconds. - Posts open up in the same type of overlay new reddit also uses. not a fan of that. - Closing the overlay makes the page reload a bit again. - Heavy focus on fluff content, a lot of the issues people have with reddit is the heavy focus on fluff content in the past few years.

"The Fluff Principle: on a user-voted news site, the links that are easiest to judge will take over unless you take specific measures to prevent it."

Source: Article by Paul Graham (the guy that started HN and funded reddit way back in the day) http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html.

What this means is basically the following, say you have two submissions:

1. An article - takes a few minutes to judge. 2. An image - takes a few seconds to judge.

So in the time that it takes person A to read and judge he article person B, C, D, E en F already saw the image and made their judgement. So basically images will rise to the top not because they are more popular, but simply because it takes less time to vote on them so they gather votes faster.

3000• 3 years ago

good luck!

what does the name comsta mean/stand for?

Comsta.net, a Reddit alternative that's easy to use

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