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.