Seconded. I use GitHub for a project, I have other projects I intend to host publicly in the future, I will take GitHub's actions into account when deciding where to host them.

The idea of federation is a good one - don't let the fuss over SoylentNews put you off.
Many of us want a return to the old days of communities being in control of their forums instead of web sites (see the recent discussions on Usenet, and the slashcott)
The hackers answer to this is distributed social networks but these haven't taken off - probably because most require users to install software.
OTOH you could have a distributed discussion system - like Usenet - except accessed through web front ends, provided anyone could set up a website to access it then competition would mean users are still in control.

From your site:

Opened up the board, and in less than 24 hours, dozens of spammer robots autoregistered and started spewing their usual crap.

All the popular cms's have antispam features built in.
I use a combination of automatically looking up posters on http://www.stopforumspam.com/ (using a drupal module) and blocking IP addresses based on a simple honeytrap. This is very effective, even with anonymous posting there are maybe one or two spam posts a week.
There is similar code that just uses php.

This one is also relevant

Thanks for posting this. The download link is broken, the correct page is here

A useful feature for both SN and |. would be to let users filter the stories shown on the main page by topic, like you can in /.
I intend to add this feature to squte.com - letting people 'subscribe' to groups and then only see posts made in those groups, it's already implemented for email notifications.
This would make the site more focused on your interests.

The 'frontend' to a web app is things like the html, css and javascript. The 'backend' is the database, and the logic in between.

stlth is a project that supposedly gives you deniable containers on Linux. Hopefully it uses plain dm-crypt for inner containers because LUKS has a distinctive header. FreeOTFE can create inner containers on LUKS volumes, but only runs on Windows

This is a common issue people have with Usenet - each reader keeps its own list of read messages. The usual suggestions are to either ssh to a command line newsreader (eg slrn), or use a web based one. Another possibility is to use a Usenet to mail interface and an IMAP mail server.

another nice feature would be to show the number of new comments in the summary i.e

n comments (m new)

Does anyone know of another site offering this functionality?

squte.com (my site) does this with a 'new' word in bold next to the comment, I used to show the whole comment title in bold, but found it distracting.

This is a standard option in Drupal, so I expect a few sites do it.

There are other possible similar features, e.g. have comments by the author of the story shown differently, comments by the user viewing the page, anonymous comments, etc, but most of them become more distracting than they are worth.

ISTM Pipedot now has more features than soylentnews despite having a fifth of the developers

The web's moved on a bit since slashdot was new. Anything without Ajax seems old-fashioned now.
Check out http://dev.soylentnews.org/ - they're experimenting with dynamic loading comments.

Thanks for letting me know. This link is now fixed. I will try to fix the others in the next week.
How far have you got with the distributed network? Is it just an idea at the moment or have you written some code?

About time there is a distributed news network

Are you suggesting that many instances of the pipedot code will be able to share comments and stories?
It's good news if you are.
I have proposed a network based on email to distribute comments and stories around websites. And as you may know, Usenet is mostly accessed through the web now, so is already a kind of distributed web news network. But if someone is prepared to do the work for a more modern system that would be even better.

The Usenet newsgroup comp.misc has lots of good articles.

Often it can be. But if the troll(s) is deliberately trying to disrupt the group, then they change their name and email often (nymshifting) to avoid killfiles. They can also copy the nym of another poster. Another trick is to post flame-bait to another group with the 'followups' set to the 'target' group. Naive users in the other group who respond have their replies sent to the target group, resulting in a lot of off-topic flames from new users.

Usenet is a great place for free, open, discussion. Unfortunately, it's got its share of trolls and spam.
There is an interface to Usenet that uses a karma-like moderation system here , which filters some of this out.

In the IRC logs someone admits its a DDoS attack:
http://logs.sylnt.us/%23soylent/2014-03-11.html
The motivation is unclear

In the IRC logs Khyber admits he's carrying out a DDoS attack:
http://logs.sylnt.us/%23soylent/2014-03-11.html

Thanks for doing this. It looks good, even better than soylentnews .
It's possible to automatically cope with javascript (JS) being off.
You have a link with an href that points to the comment on a page of its own. In JS you then set the onclick event to a function that returns false, and does your ajax stuff.
This tells the browser to not follow the link if the function runs. This then automagically does the right thing if JS is on or off.
You can also use the jQuery event.preventDefault() call.
This is what I do on squte and it's got good feedback so far.

It does look a very simple clean interface, like slashdot used to be. I will probably steal^W be inspired by it for s'qute.
Competition is good. There are literally millions of people looking for clever discussions on the internet.
Hopefully soylentnews , pipedot , slashdot and s'qute will all diverge and develop their own character and community.

I am very impressed by the speed you got the site up.
You say it isn't based on slashcode, but did you use a web framework? What technologies do you use?