Ruqqus

» see ruqqus.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

ruqqus never reached turkey at meaningful scale. it was an english-language reddit-coded product that launched into the small slice of the internet that follows reddit governance fights closely. i was not in that slice. i learned about the site afterwards while reading about the broader 2020 reddit migration window where voat (in inventory) was also still mentioned. ruqqus was one of the alternatives people pointed at for a few months.

the site launched in late 2019 from two pseudonymous developers calling themselves kek the codesmith and captainmeta4. the project was open-source, agpl-licensed, and the code lived on github. the layout was a near-pixel copy of reddit with renamed primitives. subreddits were guilds, prefixed with a plus sign instead of a slash-r. moderators could only kick a post out of a guild to a general catch-all bucket. they could not delete it outright. only the site admins could remove content for sitewide policy violations.

the pitch was free-speech in the loose american sense, meaning first-amendment-style content rules with minimal admin discretion. that pitch decided who showed up. when reddit ran what users called the great ban on june 29 2020 and removed about 2,000 subreddits including a large set with right-wing or anti-feminist labels, a portion of that displaced traffic landed on ruqqus. the server crashed under the load. for a week the site was on the front page of hacker news.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

the june 2020 spike never converted into steady use. people made accounts, posted for a few weeks, then went back to reddit. the platform did not have the long tail of niche communities that makes a forum site sticky. the guilds that did grow were the controversial ones, which gave the site a public face that the founders eventually decided they did not want.

through late 2020 and into 2021 the team made a series of moderation changes that walked back the free-speech framing. specific guilds were banned. the rules tightened. some of the early users felt the pitch had been bait-and-switched. that part is a debate the surviving hacker news threads still preserve.

~ the slide ~

the january 6 2021 capitol riot accelerated the pressure. content-moderation expectations shifted across the entire alt-platform space in the months after. parler lost its app stores. gab and similar sites were under sustained scrutiny. ruqqus was a much smaller site than any of those but the same pressure landed on a team of effectively three people working part-time on a side project.

in mid-2021 the founders began winding the project down in public. they posted about moderation overload and the impossibility of running a content site at low headcount under the conditions they were now subject to. the pitch moved from running a platform to maintaining the open-source codebase so other people could spin up their own instances.

~ the day it died ~

the main instance at ruqqus.com dissolved on october 6 2021. the codebase stayed on github for anyone who wanted to fork it. nobody really did, at least not in a way that ever got attention. the followup project the founders mentioned, which was supposed to be just the open-source software side without a hosted community, also did not produce a successor site.

ruqqus sits beside voat (in inventory) as a cleanly-dead reddit alternative from the late 2010s and early 2020s wave. cohost (in inventory) and imzy (in inventory) are different cases, since both were post-tumblr social-network attempts rather than reddit forks. ruqqus is the entry on the list where the founders themselves explained, with detail, why running a small free-speech forum at scale collapsed under its own framing.

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