What does it cost to stand up that server? Establish the core group needed to moderate the site to not have it turn into eternal spam or content that they'd rather not serve site? Pay the lawyers needed to make sure they've got NSFW and copyright take down requests handled?
It's not impossible... but the "bunch of people start up a new site" misses a lot of the technical and social aspects of barn raising ( http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/BarnRaising ).
The advantage of reddit for the backend is:
> BarnRaising is part of the difference between SlashDot and wiki. With SlashDot the barn is already raised - the OpeningStatement already written - before you start, and everyone just sits around bitchin' about it.
7 billion averages to about 2300/sec and most of that is reads. I also looked at the requests appolo makes and it polls the inbox a lot. The only maybe difficult part is paying for storage. But this isn't large scale at that size, scaling is solved anyway.
The technical things being described here put a bottom on the operational costs of standing up the servers ex nihilo.
Yes, you can stand up a server that can respond to 2300r/s and handle 200GB/day (6 TB/month which is another few hundred dollars)... and the storage for it.
The problem with standing this up is the "how do you pay for it in a way that isn't out of the goodness of your own heart" - because part of the reason people are using these is to avoid paying Reddit or see advertisements.
You will also need someone to answer take down requests for whatever legal reason exists. If you do not handle the takedown and leave it to be unmoderated, there are a number of other applications that serve as an example for the community that forms there.
The difficult part is not paying for compute, egress, or storage. The difficult part is figuring out how to get the customers to pay for it and to pay for the staff needed to maintain server and legal availability.
Writing an app that acts as a conduit for data is quite a different than than being responsible for hosting a service that provides that data.
Fair enough, it's not a trivial undertaking and I suspect reddit knows that as part of their shakedown strategy.
I still feel like the various protests going on indicate the space is absolutely ripe for an alternative and being a bad alternative might just be good enough.
Note also that many of the apps were designed to not have advertising or monthly subscription costs.
https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_ca...
> Apollo made 7 billion requests last month
What does it cost to stand up that server? Establish the core group needed to moderate the site to not have it turn into eternal spam or content that they'd rather not serve site? Pay the lawyers needed to make sure they've got NSFW and copyright take down requests handled?
It's not impossible... but the "bunch of people start up a new site" misses a lot of the technical and social aspects of barn raising ( http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/BarnRaising ).
The advantage of reddit for the backend is:
> BarnRaising is part of the difference between SlashDot and wiki. With SlashDot the barn is already raised - the OpeningStatement already written - before you start, and everyone just sits around bitchin' about it.