FAQ

Mirage is what Reddit could have been if it hadn't sold out. It keeps what people actually like: communities, posts, comments, votes, and the ability to discover communities through the crowd. The difference is what Mirage removes by design: power mods, opaque enforcement, shadow bans, and the endless rulebooks where each community feels like a different legal system. On Mirage, nobody can be banned from the entire network. There is no global moderator layer that can wipe your account, quarantine a topic, or silently throttle you. A node can choose what it shows locally for legal or policy reasons, but it cannot erase you from Mirage as a whole, and you can switch nodes seamlessly without having to start over. Moderation is voluntary and personal. You choose what you want filtered by following moderators you trust, blocking users or topics, and shaping your own feed. If you want an unfiltered view, you can choose that too. Control sits with the user, not with a small group of gatekeepers. Mirage is built as a network, not a single site. Multiple independent nodes can host Mirage frontends, index content, and serve users. You can start on any public node (such as mirage.talk) and use it like a normal forum, then switch later without losing your identity. Under the hood, Mirage uses a blockchain for real time consensus so the network agrees on the live stream of activity, but it does not store the full text of posts permanently on chain. Nodes decide what to retain. That is why it is called Mirage: content persists as long as nodes keep it, and fades if nobody retains it. Most importantly, Mirage is not a crypto bro playground. The blockchain is invisible to normal users on purpose. You do not connect a wallet, you do not buy anything, you do not learn token jargon. You write a post, your browser does a quick proof of work in the background, the post appears, done.

Yes. Mirage is designed to feel familiar on day 1. You have topics that function like subreddits, you post links or text, you comment in threads, you upvote and downvote, you browse feeds, you follow what you care about, and you ignore what you do not. What changes is everything people hate about modern platforms. There is no central company that can quietly rewrite the rules, throttle posts, or flip the site into an ad funnel. There are no power mods with global influence, no shadow bans, and no situation where your entire identity lives under a single admin. Mirage is a network made up of nodes. A node is just the website you are using to access the network. Nodes can differ in UI, uptime, and local display policies, but they do not own you. Switching nodes is seamless and does not change your content or account. Your feed is shaped by your actions, what you follow, what you vote on, what you block, and who you choose to trust, not by a hidden engagement algorithm. If you want moderation, you opt into it by following moderators. If you want less filtering, you choose that too. You are not stuck under one set of rules written by strangers.

That is the entire point of Mirage. Mirage keeps what worked about Reddit: topic-based communities, posts, comments, voting, discovery, and pseudonymity. What it removes are the things people grew to hate: power moderators, opaque enforcement, shadow bans, endless rule creep, and being locked under one company's decisions. You do not have to learn a new social model. You just get the same experience, without being trapped.

Every existing Reddit alternative still assumes that someone owns the place you live. Either it is a company, or it is a server admin, or it is a federation council in practice. Power accumulates quietly, and exit is costly. Mirage assumes the opposite. Identity is portable. Moderation is voluntary. Nodes are roads, not rulers. If something goes bad, you leave instantly without losing anything. That single design choice eliminates most of the failure modes people complain about on r/redditalternatives.

Yes. Mirage is free to use in the very literal sense. You can browse, read, post, comment, and vote without paying anything. There is no paywall to participate, no subscription required to speak, and no requirement to buy tokens just to use the platform. The basic tier is fully functional. In the basic tier, Mirage uses browser proof of work to protect the network from spam and abuse. That happens automatically in the background and does not involve payments, wallets, or personal information. It is simply the cost of participation instead of money or surveillance. Subscriptions exist, but they are optional. A subscription removes friction and increases limits, for example skipping proof of work delays, reserving a clean username, longer posts, and other convenience features. Subscriptions are paid with MIRAGE inside the product, not with credit cards, and they are never required to participate. The core rule is simple. If you want to use Mirage like a normal forum, you can do so for free. Paying only buys convenience, not power.

The "catch" is that there is no safety net where a platform can quietly fix things for you. You own your account via a seed phrase, so you are responsible for it. There is no central moderator to clean up the entire network for everyone, so moderation is opt-in and user driven. There is no ad revenue to subsidize abuse, so basic usage costs a small amount of compute instead of money or surveillance. Those are deliberate tradeoffs. Most platforms remove friction by centralizing power, then slowly abuse that power over time. Mirage removes power instead. That means fewer magical guarantees, but also no sudden rule changes, no shadow bans, no account nukes, no payment lockouts, and no silent algorithm shifts. So the real answer is: Mirage does not promise comfort through control. It offers freedom through structure. Whether that is a "catch" depends on what you value.

Yes. Mirage is built so you do not have to care about crypto at all. You can use Mirage like a normal forum. Browse topics, read posts, comment, and vote. There is no wallet to install, no tokens to buy, and no crypto concepts you need to understand. Everything happens inside the website. The blockchain exists in the background to prevent capture and lock-in, not to turn users into crypto participants. If you never want to think about it, you do not have to.

Because Mirage is not a permanent archive pretending to be a town square. The network agrees on what happened, who said it, and in what order. That part is real. But the content itself is intentionally ephemeral. Posts exist as long as nodes choose to keep serving them. Nothing is forced to live forever just because it was written once. That design avoids the two extremes that break social platforms: total erasure by centralized power, and permanent immutability that turns every joke, mistake, or argument into a lifelong record. Mirage sits in the middle. The shared reality is durable. The surface is ephemeral. You are not writing into a database owned by a company, and you are not etching everything into stone. You are participating in a live network that remembers what matters and lets the rest fade.

Mirage is for people who want open discussion without being managed. It is for users who are tired of power moderators, opaque enforcement, rule creep, shadow bans, and platforms changing behavior without recourse. It is for people who want the Reddit experience without being locked under one company, one database, and one set of incentives. Mirage is not for people who want a fully curated, centrally enforced environment where someone else decides what is acceptable everywhere. It is not for people who want a platform that can retroactively erase history or guarantee permanent comfort through authority. Mirage is built for users who value exit, choice, and transparency over convenience enforced by control.