Launching Your Own Reddit Alternative: Reddit vs Telescope

You’ve probably heard about the recent Reddit drama: a slew of unpopular decisions by Reddit management led to some major subreddits temporarily shutting down in protest, and many users voiced their intention to abandon the site.

This in turn created a renewed interest around Reddit alternatives, as shown by this now-famous Google Trends graph:

“Reddit alternative” on Google Trends

Some of the more popular options, like Voat or Snapzu are homespun, original codebases. But not everybody has the necessary coding skills to create a Reddit-site like from scratch.

Reddit vs Telescope

So if you too want to launch your own Reddit alternative, you have a couple options. You could use Reddit’s own codebase, since it’s free and open-source.

Or you could use Telescope. It’s also a free, open-source Reddit-style app, but it sports a few key differences with Reddit.

So in this post, I’ll walk you through a couple key questions to help you understand these differences, and pick the app that’s best for your own needs.

Reddit & Reddit Just to be clear, in this post whenever I talk about “using Reddit” it will refer to running your own copy of Reddit’s codebase, not using the actual Reddit site.

Which Operating System Do You Run?

Reddit features a helpful install script, but that install script is designed for Ubuntu, not Mac OS or Windows.

The full install instructions on the other hand are pretty daunting, with multiple steps and separate components.

Telescope’s install process is a little easier and, crucially, works equally well on Windows, Mac OS, or Linux.

So if you’re running Windows or Mac OS, Telescope will probably be a lot easier to set up locally.

The r/RedditDev subreddit is a great place to get support for setting up Reddit.

How Comfortable Are You With Server Administration?

Even Reddit’s install script will require a basic level of familiarity with Ubuntu and sysadmins stuff. If sentences like “the easiest thing is probably editing /etc/hosts on the host machine” make no sense to you, you might get stuck if you happen to run into any issues.

Telescope does also require you to use the command line for basic operations such as set up, update, and deployment, but it’s a little bit more user-friendly. Thanks to tools like Meteor Up, you should be able to do every operation remotely with simple command entered from your local machine, without having to actually log in to your server.

And if all you want is quickly get started, you can use Telescope’s one-click deploy on Heroku to try it out right away.

Do You Need Themes And Plug-ins?

While Reddit is popular and open-source, it’s not a popular open-source app. In other words, while Reddit Inc is gracious enough to provide their code for free, it’s not trying to create the ecosystem and community that has developed around other open-source apps like WordPress or Drupal.

As Redditor crimson117 put it:

Reddit is difficult to deploy. It’s mostly open source, but it’s not designed to be widely distributed and easy to install, especially when compared to, say, PHPBB.

While Telescope isn’t quite at WordPress-level popularity just yet, it does have a growing collection of themes you can use for free, with more on the way.

The Magellan theme for Telescope.

Do You Need Subreddits?

Reddit’s key selling point is its subreddit feature: unlike traditional message boards with their predefined categories, Reddit lets anybody create, customize, and moderate their own sub-forum.

While Telescope supports categories, it doesn’t have something as powerful and flexible as subreddits. So if that’s a key requirement, Reddit will be better suited to your needs.

Do You Expect Millions Of Users?

One thing you can say about Reddit is that it’s battle-tested: it’s one of the most popular sites on the Internet, and it’s survived through countless DoS attacks.

Obviously, merely installing Reddit’s codebase won’t give you the same scaling and infrastructure that it benefits from. But it’s certainly a good start.

On the other hand, Telescope hasn’t (yet) been tested at that scale. Although it can happily support thousands of users relatively cheaply, if you’re planning for the whole population of Canada (approximately 36 million people) to log on then Reddit might prove to be a safer choice.

Less Wrong, one of the most active communities based on Reddit.

Which Features Do You Need?

Reddit and Telescope have a lot in common (submitting links, commenting and voting on them, nested comment threads, etc.) but they also each have their specific features, too.

For example, Reddit comes with an extensive API, a private message system, and the ability to add users as friends.

Telescope supports automated email newsletters, auto-posting from RSS feeds, optional Twitter and Facebook log-in, and also features the day-by-day view made popular by Product Hunt.

So a good way to choose can be to make a list of all the features you expect you’ll need, and see which option satisfies it best.

Watch Judge running Telescope’s default theme.

Which Programming Language Are You Comfortable With?

Reddit uses Python, while Telescope is based on the Meteor framework, which itself uses JavaScript.

If you’re already familiar with either one, you’ll probably have an easier time picking the matching codebase.

If on the other hand you know neither Python nor JavaScript, then I would probably recommend starting with JavaScript. It’s the most common language on the web, and there are lots of free resources available to learn it.

Crater, a highly customized Telescope site.

Conclusion

Let’s go over our two contenders one last time:

The Case For Reddit Reddit is an older, stabler project with a decade-long track record, and it’s also tailor-made to support extra sub-communities in the form of subreddits. On the other hand, it’s also a not that welcoming and harder to get into. There’s also relatively few examples of other sites successfully running Reddit’s codebase, and no real active ecosystem around the app. So pick Reddit if: You need to let your users create their own sub-communities.

You expect a huge amount of traffic.

You’re comfortable with basic sysadmin tasks.

The Case For Telescope Telescope is a newer project that’s just getting started with an active and friendly community, and it was conceived from the start to be easy to install, deploy, and customize. But then again, it can suffer from some of the growing pains that come with younger projects; and it’s also not as feature-rich in a couple aspects. So pick Telescope if: You want to be able to install ready-made themes and plugins.

You want an easy way to customize your app’s look-and-feel and behavior.

You prefer a simplified install and deployment process.

As you can see, both solutions have their pros and cons. Hopefully this article will help you understand the differences, and choose the one that’s best for you!