What is reddit-clone?

This project is a clone of Reddit's core forum functionality, built with TypeScript, meant as a starting point for people who want to create their own niche online community rather than compete with Reddit itself. The author's argument is that most attempts to build a Reddit alternative fail because they focus on better technology or design instead of the thing that actually grows a forum: the community and how it is curated. The codebase reproduces Reddit's basic features, such as threaded comments and voting, and the author expects people to fork the project and use AI coding assistants like Claude Code to customize it for their own community's needs. Rather than shipping a polished, general-purpose alternative, the goal is to give technical users a working foundation they can quickly reshape. Much of the README walks through the author's own example: a community for serious political discussion, along with the specific problems they see in Reddit's current voting system, such as downvotes being used to silence disagreement instead of judging how informative a comment is. The author suggests possible changes, like replacing downvotes with labeled reasons for disagreement, or replacing upvotes with a credit-like system, as examples of the kind of customization this clone is meant to support, not as features already built in. For deployment, the author recommends a specific but flexible stack: Vercel for hosting, Supabase for a free Postgres database, Neon for Redis, and AWS for running background job workers, while suggesting Postgres full text search as a simpler substitute for Elasticsearch unless you have spare hardware to run search yourself. The project accepts contributions focused on matching Reddit's interface more closely, and explicitly excludes certain features from consideration, including awards, polls, contest mode, and moderation automation tools, since the goal is a standard forum shape rather than feature parity with Reddit. The README does not mention a license, so the terms for reuse are not stated.