I'm building HN alternative =)

- https://crow.watch

I guess this is pretty much the point people don't like. I will redo the the registration.

The offline community does not have a problem with spammers/impersonators. For online communities this is much more difficult. I don't know what kind of struggle and filtering HN implemented to deal this it. But I do not want to build complicated anti-abuse systems. Right now registration is open, after certain size i will "restrict" registrations.

The https://crow.watch is heavily inspired by lobster. basically same algorithm, same flagging, amd tag filtering. one key difference is [show] tag with dedicated "Show" page. A feature from HN, which lobster does not have. Invite-only where is only to prevent spam in the future. I will rephrase the login page. Will make it "open" and as we see spammers will close down.

those looks not very promising.

building a community is hard. but i'm dedicated to a building a small tech community anyway.

this is why i'm investing into building crow.watch.

I was a lobster user for 7y. but i find it now way to big, and moderation is strange sometimes. I think, having an additional community is nice. No need to concentrate everybody in one or two website. And there are multiple communities already! I thought I can build one with not such restrictive self-promo rules as on lobster.

your last point is actually a huge turn off for me.

this is why i think having different communities is a nice thing.

it's just that most of the self promotion going on over here is ai slop nowadays (oh you vibe coded an app? the whole "point" of it is that anyone can do it, so your vibecoded thing is completely uninteresting).

And you want more of that? Does not compute, for me

obviously not more of ai slop, but people still do cool project!

yes, crow watch focus is tech and computers only

> Comments need protection, otherwise you get bombarded with spam. That alone is a ridiculous amount of "hard".

This is not that hard. But your mileage may vary.

> Comments need a database, that is objectively harder than using Jekyll or the other examples you give.

Are we engineers or not?

> But the statement that it's not hard is objectively false.

Yes, I agree.

People spend hours polishing personal websites. I want to encourage building comments systems! This is as fun and as valuable!

> And ai commentary is a waste of electrons.

What is it?

we may be interested in it.

how does it handle very bad internet connection on-prem?

Feel free to reach out via our website[1]. Distr does not require an internet connection to keep your application running. Update commands are fetched directly from the agent and do not require any special connectivity.

Updates are pulled before the rollover to a new version is performed, so a poor internet connection may only affect the download speed of new updates. Distr is designed to operate even when no connection is available, or when connectivity is only allowed in short time slots.

[1] https://distr.sh/contact/