CAPTCHAs and sign‑up quizzes annoy real people and barely slow down determined bots. As the fediverse grows, we need smarter, more humane defences, ones that don’t push away genuine newcomers. What creative, non‑intrusive ideas do you have? Trust‑based vouching, proof‑of‑humanity protocols, behavioural signals... what feels both effective and aligned with the open social web? I’m building a social media platform and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this topic.

I’m aware of Photon and Alexandrite, but since Alexandrite is now unmaintained, Photon seems to be my only viable option at the moment. I’ve also been searching for an old Reddit–style UI, but so far I haven’t been able to find one that fits the bill.

Does anyone know of any active alternatives, or ways to achieve that classic look with current tools?

For example this search I did was supposed to limit results to last week and showed something 11 months old:

https://programming.dev/search?q=webml&type=All&listingType=All&page=1&sort=TopWeek&titleOnly=false

Building a small social platform. I want users to post complaints/ideas, upvote the top issues, and have devs tackle the top 3, transparently with tags, milestones or kanban to show what stage each issue is at.

Need one self-hosted FOSS tool (or two that integrate well) for both discussion and voting/prioritization.

What's your recommended stack? Zulip, Fider, Discourse, Forgejo...? Something else?

Thanks!

One of the main features of my site will be Discourse-style trust levels, the higher your trust level, the more moderation privileges you gain. I'm also considering either a jury system, where multiple users collaborate on moderation decisions, or a meta-moderation system, where users can vote "fair" or "unfair" on moderation actions taken.

Someone mentioned to me in another post that Bluesky also has a very good moderation system, but the best one I've found so far is Discourse. What I really like about it is that you earn trust levels by reading posts, not by taking moderation actions. I definitely don't want to gamify moderation the way Stack Overflow did, that was the worst I've ever seen.

The pattern is always the same:

1. Someone passionate creates a community
2. Early members are deeply invested — high-quality discussions, strong norms
3. Community grows, hits the front page / "all"
4. New users flood in, post memes, low-effort content, drive-by hot takes
5. Old-timers get drowned out
6. Mods either burn out and quit, or become dictators ruling their own fiefdom

Reddit's model accelerates this. Any subreddit that gets popular enough hits the All feed, and at that point the incentives shift from "quality contribution" to "what gets upvotes from the broadest audience." The people who built the community lose control of it.

I'm working on a social platform and I'm trying to design communities that don't go through this lifecycle. This is what I have in mind right now. A user's voting power within a community is proportional to their tenure in that specific community. So if someone's been there for 2 years, their vote counts more than someone who joined yesterday. No matter how many new users show up, they can't swing the community away from the people who built it.

The weighting wouldn't be dramatic, maybe a logarithmic curve where the first month gives you baseline power and it grows slowly over years. The goal isn't to create an aristocracy, just to make sure the signal from committed members isn't buried by a flash mob.

Implementation-wise I'm thinking:

• Each community membership has a joined_at timestamp
• When scoring a post within that community's feed, each boost/vote is multiplied by log2(days_since_join + 1) / log2(30) — so 1 day = 0.05x, 30 days = 1x, 1 year = ~1.7x, 5 years = ~2.1x
• The algorithm still surfaces new content to everyone, but the ranking is weighted toward longer-tenured members' tastes
• Also considering: a slow-boot period where new members' posts are held for review by existing members (like a probation phase)

But I'm second-guessing myself. Some concerns:

• Does this just create a gerontocracy where old members gatekeep forever?
• How do you handle the first 30 days when no one has much weight?
• Would this actually prevent the decay, or just slow it down?
• Is there a simpler/better mechanism I'm missing?

Curious what other approaches people have seen work (or fail). Has anyone implemented tenure-weighted voting before?

Edit: I appreciate the suggestions. A few of them actually align with features I’ve already built:

• Trust graph: The platform already uses directed trust edges, with vouching and inviter accountability (if an invitee misbehaves, the inviter is penalized). I can extend this model from the platform level down to individual communities.

• Invite-only mode: I already have trust-based monthly invite limits for the whole platform, so adding the same option for communities seems like a natural extension.

• Slow-boot / probation: This is already in place, new members’ posts are held for curator review before being published.

• Different interaction types: The system already supports multiple interaction types (like, comment, share, gift, emoji). I'm not sure how to expand these into Slashdot-style categories (e.g. agree/disagree, insightful/funny, quality/shitpost, high/low effort, etc.), but it's something I'd like to explore.

• Moderation limits: I like Slashdot's approach of limiting moderation to prevent burnout. I'm less certain whether meta-moderation would be a good fit here, but I'm open to considering it.

I’m trying to convert a blog into an EPUB and keep running into issues with existing tools.

I first tried blog2epub, but it fails during parsing with:

lxml.etree.XMLSyntaxError: Opening and ending tag mismatch: meta line 10 and head, line 17, column 8

I then tried WebToEpub on Firefox, providing:

• Content selector: .article-content
• Chapter title selector: .title

It generated an EPUB, but the file wouldn’t open in any reader.

What I’m looking for is a tool where I can point to a blog’s base URL, define CSS selectors for the article title and body, and have it automatically fetch all entries and create one chapter per post. Or something similar.

Does anyone know of a reliable tool, script, or workflow that does this well on Linux?

I’ve been switching from Vim to Helix recently. I did the built-in tutor, and whenever I need to configure something, I look it up in the docs. The problem is, I only find what I already know to look for. Without reading the documentation more broadly, I don’t really know what I can configure in the first place.

So I’m curious, do you sit down and read documentation to understand a tool, or do you just search it when you hit a specific problem?

I’d like to be able to navigate text in a pager with Vim-style modal editing (moving with hjkl and yank/paste with y/p). Is there a way to enable this in the default pager, or is there an alternative pager that supports this kind of modal behavior?

I want to improve my touch typing skills on Linux. I’m curious:

1. What tool or program would you recommend for learning touch typing on Linux?
2. For someone whose native language isn’t English, would you recommend learning on their native keyboard layout or switching to the US QWERTY layout for programming purposes?

I'm looking for a way to generate a single Markdown (.md) file that includes all the file names, function definitions, and docstrings from my Python files. Ideally, this should traverse a directory recursively while respecting the .gitignore rules.

Does anyone know of a package that accomplishes this?