Self-Hosted Reddit Alternatives

bbs-go is a community forum software written in Go. It functions as a gamified community platform and social network framework, providing tools for hosting public discussions, managing knowledge bases, and coordinating user identities. The platform is distinguished by an integrated gamification engine that tracks activity via daily check-ins and reward tasks to award experience points, levels, and badges. It also features a specialized identity and access manager that supports role-based access control and third-party identity federation, including Google Sign-In integration. The system covers a broad range of community capabilities, including threaded discussion forums with Q&A workflows, node-based content organization using tags, and social networking features such as follower relationships and notifications. Administrative operations are handled through a centralized management dashboard with keyword filtering and audit-logged security trails.

Lemmy is a self-hosted, federated discussion platform that enables the operation of independent, decentralized social networking servers. By implementing the ActivityPub protocol, it allows autonomous instances to exchange content, synchronize user interactions, and participate in a global, distributed network without centralized control. The platform distinguishes itself through a decoupled architecture that separates the backend API from the frontend, facilitating the development of custom interfaces while maintaining unified user handles and cross-platform communication. It provides granular administrative and moderation tools, including public action auditing, role delegation, and the ability to manage federated connections, which allows administrators to enforce local community standards across the broader network. The system supports a comprehensive suite of social features, including threaded conversations, content voting, and hierarchical discussion management. It is designed for scalability, utilizing asynchronous background processing and horizontal service partitioning to handle federation workloads and traffic efficiently. Administrators can further secure and customize their instances through integrated traffic controls, language filtering, and support for anonymous network routing. The project provides containerized deployment workflows and automated database migration management to simplify the maintenance of self-hosted environments.

Flarum is a PHP-based community forum software designed for building and managing structured online discussion spaces. It functions as a self-hosted discussion forum and threaded discussion engine, providing a platform for users to create and participate in community conversations. The platform is designed as an extensible community platform, allowing for customizable forum development through the use of custom extenders to modify system behavior and features. The system includes capabilities for online community management and forum hosting, supported by a console interface for executing administrative tasks and configuring application paths.

Discourse is an open-source forum engine designed to facilitate long-form threaded conversations and community management. Built as a server-side application, it provides a structured, category-based interface for interactive online communities, supporting user authentication, moderation, and real-time content delivery. The platform utilizes a relational database to manage complex relationships between users, topics, and site settings. The application distinguishes itself through a modular architecture that allows for custom plugins and themes, enabling the adaptation of discussion spaces to diverse organizational needs. It provides a single-page application experience through a component-based frontend framework and maintains responsiveness during high-volume activity by offloading asynchronous tasks to a multi-threaded background processing engine. External applications can interact with the platform through a standardized programming interface, which supports the management of community data, user interactions, and moderation tasks. Beyond its core discussion capabilities, the platform functions as a content management system that supports searchable knowledge base creation and full-text search indexing. The codebase is organized to provide clear access to integration endpoints, facilitating programmatic control over posts and categories.

Jasmine is a digital comic reader and community content platform designed for browsing, reading, and organizing digital comic collections. It functions as a comic library manager that allows users to track reading progress, save favorite titles, and categorize comic series. The application is an offline-capable web app that employs local-first data and content caching to ensure comic pages remain accessible without an internet connection. It features a responsive page viewer that adjusts comic dimensions based on the device screen size to maintain readability. The platform integrates social and discovery capabilities, including user account management and community discussion tools for exchanging ideas through comments. Users can locate specific series through search interfaces and explore digital catalogs via categorized libraries.

Red-DiscordBot is a modular framework for building and self-hosting Discord bots. It functions as a server management tool and community moderation bot that can be tailored by enabling or disabling specific feature modules. The system is distinguished by its extensible plugin architecture, which allows for the integration of third-party modules and the development of custom functional packages. Users can manage bot behavior through a chat-based interface, enabling them to assemble custom bots and define unique responses and behaviors without writing new code. The framework covers a broad range of capabilities, including automated server moderation, role-based access control, and community engagement tools such as audio streaming and interactive trivia. It also provides automation for repetitive administrative tasks and real-time notifications for external stream activity. The software is designed for self-hosting on local machines or private servers with support for lifecycle automation and backup routines.