This is actually why I really love Tildes. I did dabble in USENET but other forums were soon more accessible (my go to was phpBB, which is only #4). It's possibly the closest thing since the...
This is actually why I really love Tildes. I did dabble in USENET but other forums were soon more accessible (my go to was phpBB, which is only #4).
It's possibly the closest thing since the "Llamas on Fire" board (which was the #1 for me back in the day, and also where I met my SO) today, with an adequate mix of Reddit's good bits.
Older doesn't necessarily mean better, but I suspect if the internet was thrust back to USENET times, a lot of shifts would be made in a more positive direction.
I always had a mildly-insane idea kicking around in the back of my head along the lines of a next-gen, but low-tech Usenet, fully broadcasted on HAM and/or LoRA frequencies instead of the...
I always had a mildly-insane idea kicking around in the back of my head along the lines of a next-gen, but low-tech Usenet, fully broadcasted on HAM and/or LoRA frequencies instead of the traditional channels.
There's actual interesting history about this (side note: I have a HAM license, but haven't touched a radio in a long time). Packet Radio used to be a bit of a thing, with "digipeaters" that acted...
There's actual interesting history about this (side note: I have a HAM license, but haven't touched a radio in a long time). Packet Radio used to be a bit of a thing, with "digipeaters" that acted like regular HAM repeaters...and one of the Internet precursors, ALOHAnet, was a packet radio network.
The need for licensing would heavily limit adoption on HAM bands though. Something lower range on Part 15 spectrum is probably more viable. Like WiFi or BLE mesh networks. (BitChat is something along the latter lines.)
Was interesting to find out about USENET, an early forum-like system which, by my understanding, predated the modern world wide web and used it's own custom protocols. Also, I somehow missed the...
Was interesting to find out about USENET, an early forum-like system which, by my understanding, predated the modern world wide web and used it's own custom protocols.
Also, I somehow missed the fact that "Discourse" is open-source. Now it makes sense why so many open-source communities use it... and it's pretty good and has A LOT of features.
Another cool aspect of USENET was that it was very distributed. People would use uucp to download news, discussion threads, and emails before responding to and resharing them on the peer-to-peer...
Another cool aspect of USENET was that it was very distributed. People would use uucp to download news, discussion threads, and emails before responding to and resharing them on the peer-to-peer chain.
Just responding to agree with this XD I read this line from OP: And made an audible HNNNGGGG sound as my soul departed the frail remains of body (to OP: I'm glad you're learning about this stuff!...
Just responding to agree with this XD I read this line from OP:
Was interesting to find out about USENET [...]
And made an audible HNNNGGGG sound as my soul departed the frail remains of body
(to OP: I'm glad you're learning about this stuff! Old people just occasionally get hit by the truck of time, and joking about the briefness of life helps with the 'ol existential dread. Please pay this no mind)
Don't feel bad. I'm a 2000s "kid" and even though not long ago I considered myself young, more and more things are reminding me the opposite these days. I still feel 18 inside :D The first forums...
Don't feel bad. I'm a 2000s "kid" and even though not long ago I considered myself young, more and more things are reminding me the opposite these days. I still feel 18 inside :D
The first forums I came across were gaming related (counter-strike, runescape ...) at around 2013-2014. I can't say for all of them, but phpBB rings a strong bell for me so at least some of them must have been that.
When did Usenet stop being a thing, by the way? Late 90's like the article mentioned? And how did it differ from modern forums?
It still exists, so opinions on this will vary wildly depending on who you ask. Regardless it's worth noting that the decline/cultural shift of Usenet is the origin of the phrase "Eternal...
When did Usenet stop being a thing, by the way?
It still exists, so opinions on this will vary wildly depending on who you ask. Regardless it's worth noting that the decline/cultural shift of Usenet is the origin of the phrase "Eternal September" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
Usenet didn't stop being a thing. It has a surprisingly large userbase in the Netherlands and there are plenty of providers available. Usually Usenet is presented as the alternative to torrents.
Usenet didn't stop being a thing. It has a surprisingly large userbase in the Netherlands and there are plenty of providers available. Usually Usenet is presented as the alternative to torrents.
I've never done Usenet, but have been aware of its existence since I started using computers as a kid in the late 90s. My understanding was it was a function of new groups of people getting online...
I've never done Usenet, but have been aware of its existence since I started using computers as a kid in the late 90s. My understanding was it was a function of new groups of people getting online and starting with something else...much like how many people now only use the Web on a smartphone and only come in contact with a handful of companies providing centralized services. It's just what they're familiar with.
In the 90s, people joining the Internet were doing so for the Web, because it was the hot new thing (even if they didn't necessarily grasp that distinction). They were there for Yahoo and eBay and Hotmail and such. They clicked the blue E on Windows and used the paved road of software directing them to what they actually wanted. The typical person wasn't thinking about how networks work or picking out software.
Also, we had ISPs like America On Line, which were trying to build a curated gated community. So many people's experience with the Internet then was through that. One stop for email, web browsing and chat functionality. AIM was huge. My grandma was able to use AIM and make voice calls.
Oh man, I just remembered a relative on my mom's side of the family had a Prodigy email back then. Now I'm trying to remember the other proto-ISP that had a closed network. They're where GIF...
Oh man, I just remembered a relative on my mom's side of the family had a Prodigy email back then. Now I'm trying to remember the other proto-ISP that had a closed network. They're where GIF originated.
Edit: CompuServe
I was too young for that stage of computing. My family got our first computer in 1998 and we started with Juno and moved on to AOL a little later. (Then ADSL from a local ISP around 2005.)
Compuserve, AOL, and Prodigy were all BBS systems that evolved into the first major ISPs. The loss of geographically-bound (due to long distance call rates) online spaces is bittersweet. I still...
Compuserve, AOL, and Prodigy were all BBS systems that evolved into the first major ISPs. The loss of geographically-bound (due to long distance call rates) online spaces is bittersweet.
I still vaguely remember browsing Cartoon Network stuff on the Prodigy BBS. It was considered the family-friendly option at the time, before my family switched to AOL, probably for price reasons.
It would be really cool to have something like Discourse, but less resource-hungry. Like a Go application that can be easily deployed to cheaper VPSes. A forum could even get away with an SQLite...
It would be really cool to have something like Discourse, but less resource-hungry. Like a Go application that can be easily deployed to cheaper VPSes. A forum could even get away with an SQLite database, since it's heavy read, low write and expected to only have one server instance.
Tbh, there is very little wrong with old fashioned LAMP based forums like phpBB (which is still getting updates) or more modern Flarum. These will run on a lot of webhosting offerings as that is...
Tbh, there is very little wrong with old fashioned LAMP based forums like phpBB (which is still getting updates) or more modern Flarum. These will run on a lot of webhosting offerings as that is still what a lot of them offer. Takes away the need for you to maintain the VPS as well.
If you don't like using the LAMP stack there are other alternatives out there (for which you will need a VPS I suppose) like NodeBB as well which is Node.JS based.
I am sure you can make a reasonable forum in GO as well if you set out to do so. But forums, even seemingly simple ones, are fairly complex. A lot of the lightweight solutions people start out with are also light weight because they lack (often decades) of accumulated features, spam handling, moderation tooling, etc.
Most of the alternatives I mentioned will be less resource hungry than Discourse anyway (Heck, phpBB hasn't changed that much and ran fine on hardware from decades ago). Discourse had made some design choices that simply make it resource hungry. Less to do with the language (Which is Ruby ) and more with architecture.
I'm aware phpBB (and paid options like VBulletin and XenForo) are still kicking, and visit a few sites periodically that use them...but I'm not crazy about LAMP stuff (or JS anything, for that...
I'm aware phpBB (and paid options like VBulletin and XenForo) are still kicking, and visit a few sites periodically that use them...but I'm not crazy about LAMP stuff (or JS anything, for that matter), despite it having been a formative part of my early forays into programming.
My line of thinking is that the way one spins up a web site has evolved over the years. In the early 2000s, paying a shared hosting provider and FTPing some PHP files that would run in their environment was fairly normal. But that's kind of outdated.
You get a lot more bang for your buck from somewhere like DigitalOcean, Linode, Hetzner, or AWS's VPS option (Light-something?)...and then are in the position of needing to set things up. It's actually easier to have a self-contained binary or JAR that runs its own server (which can be put behind nginx or Caddy) that can be installed through a package manager or Docker pull than messing with PHP-FPM to get your web root to process PHP files. Something like SQLite also removes a dependency on a database server and further reduces memory overhead. I envision aggressive in-process caching as well...especially in our world of LLM crawlers DDoSing forums.
It's something I've toyed with the idea of prototyping, but don't want to commit to or end up being responsible for supporting at this point in time.
I think this is fine in itself. It is not your preference and that is okay. The technical reasoning you are giving I do have some thoughts on which I just wanted to share in general. Feel free to...
..but I'm not crazy about LAMP stuff (or JS anything, for that matter),
I think this is fine in itself. It is not your preference and that is okay. The technical reasoning you are giving I do have some thoughts on which I just wanted to share in general. Feel free to skip all that, as I said having a tech stack preference is absolutely okay. I do also respond to the overall idea you have been toying with at the bottom if you are interested on my thoughts there.
FTPing some PHP files that would run in their environment was fairly normal. But that's kind of outdated.
Yup, that would be outdated ;) Shared webhosters have also evolved over the years, a lot of them these days offer SSH access as well with composer preinstalled. It is how you would install Flarum for example.
As far as bang for your bucks go, I am not so sure to be honest. It depends on what you consider to be the "bang" I guess. If you also want to host other stuff on the VPS from different stacks then absolutely. If it is just about decent performance (or better), lots of space and often a domain include then shared webhosters provide a pretty good bang for your buck. At least around these parts they do.
Many also offer one click installations from a web interface, which I am not a huge fan of myself but mostly because of control reasons. The times I tried it the software installed without issue.
It's actually easier to have a self-contained binary or JAR that runs its own server (which can be put behind nginx or Caddy) that can be installed through a package manager or Docker pull than messing with PHP-FPM to get your web root to process PHP files.
Somewhat true, if you compare doing php stuff yourself on a VPS to other stuff. As I said, with a shared webhost you often also get composer included which means it is just a command line installation. And even on a VPS, php configuration is fairly straightforward and most modern php software is installed with a package manager like composer. Which does bring it on the same level as setting up docker properly and doing a docker pull imho.
And I would want to point out that running a JAR sits a bit awkwardly next to the resource argument. I'd say it would be on par with running PHP software.
Something like SQLite also removes a dependency on a database server and further reduces memory overhead.
Lobste.rs recently switched to SQLite, so it certainly is possible. Though they had quite some issues to work out since SQLite for all its pros also has quite a few idiosyncrasies compared to more traditional choices like MySQL or PostgreSQL. Just to be clear, Lobste.rs itself isn't a single package so I am purely using it as an example for the SQLite bit.
Memory overhead will be less, that is true. But it does come with a few tradeoffs like limited datatypes and a somewhat more complex backup situation as you can't just point a cron job to mysqldump /pgdump. Full blown databases also do offer a bunch of additional nice features with that memory overhead. Certainly PostgreSQL can be really neat since it allows for structured storage of indexable json data.
I envision aggressive in-process caching as well...especially in our world of LLM crawlers DDoSing forums.
I was sitting on the lobste.rs IRC the other day when they were dealing with a wave of crawlers. In-process caching only does so much, since crawlers hit everything and hit deep. Post permalinks, profiles any dynamic endpoint unauthenticated users might hit.
A lot of those will never be in memory from recent usage, so you want other caching as well. On tildes it isn't doing as part of caching, but when logged out a bunch of dynamic pages are also limited. User profiles for example don't do pagination for logged out users. This limits what crawlers can and also would make caching a lot easier.
I do agree that smart caching can help a ton in mitigating the impact of bad crawlers once they arrive. But, ideally you want to prevent them from getting their digital grubby fingers on whatever tech stack you are building your forum on. Which means things like rate limiting, Anubis, Cloudflare and/or ASN blocking although results from these also vary and they can negatively impact users as well.
It's something I've toyed with the idea of prototyping, but don't want to commit to or end up being responsible for supporting at this point in time.
Very understandable! Like I said, forum software is fairly complex. Certainly when you are providing it to others, as you can't get away with doing some things through queries by hand as you would for something you only use.
I do think that GO would be an excellent choice regardless if you ever decide to go through with it. It might not look like it with the way I defended the good old LAMP stack, but I always welcome new initiatives for community platforms :)
The term you're looking for is Amazon Lightsail, fyi. Personally, I think for blogs you can absolutely get away with a LAMP stack, or even less. My personal blog is running on a DigitalOcean VPS...
The term you're looking for is Amazon Lightsail, fyi.
Personally, I think for blogs you can absolutely get away with a LAMP stack, or even less. My personal blog is running on a DigitalOcean VPS using AlmaLinux and Apache HTTP server, I just write markdown files and use a static site generator. I have SSL set up but there's not much for it to cover, the files are uploaded via rsync and there's nowhere for readers to submit anything to the server - there's not even a search box, just tags/categories that viewers can click. Prior to the current setup, it was running Wordpress (which is the poster child for LAMP) but I realized it had more features than I cared about and pared it down. Honestly, I think knowing where to upload files is the biggest barrier to this kind of setup being more common.
I really enjoyed the history lesson of the article, although as someone who's making a modern forum, its very hard for me to agree with the conclusion that forums lost out due to novelty. There's...
I really enjoyed the history lesson of the article, although as someone who's making a modern forum, its very hard for me to agree with the conclusion that forums lost out due to novelty. There's a myriad of reasons that forums lost, I'll just list 3 obvious ones:
Images and video doesn't really fit the forum format
Modern and especially younger audiences don't prefer to consume text
Forum UX (with the exception of Discourse) has not improved. It doesn't mean it can't. It absolutely can. Its just that the other platforms got so big that nobody bothers to make forum software anymore (again except Discourse)
Tildes is another great example of a modern, intentionally designed, text-based forum.
PS: There's a link on my profile for my project if you are curious.
This is something Ive noticed as well. I am a car guy and have had several older cars (not classic cars but more like 1990s and early 2000s) and because of that I spent a lot of time using forums....
Modern and especially younger audiences don't prefer to consume text
This is something Ive noticed as well.
I am a car guy and have had several older cars (not classic cars but more like 1990s and early 2000s) and because of that I spent a lot of time using forums. I still do but these days YouTube has a lot of car repairs videos for pretty much any car.
Recently, I had a younger relative ask me for help on his 07 Toyota Tacoma. He ran into a problem and couldn't find a solution on YouTube. Before I helped him, I told him to try searching a well known Tacoma forum and he couldn't find a solution on there either.
I started looking into it. about 30 minutes, some searching, and reading roughly 10 pages of a few different threads in this Tacoma forum and I found the solution.
A week or so later, when I was helping him install the replacement part, I brought up the Tacoma forum and he basically said "I'm not reading ten pages of threads and their replies from 2009!"
Great story! I am not as into cars as you but back in the day I was lurking in a few Aston Martin forums like a submarine cuz I wanted to get a feel what its like owning one. YouTube reviews don't...
Great story!
I am not as into cars as you but back in the day I was lurking in a few Aston Martin forums like a submarine cuz I wanted to get a feel what its like owning one. YouTube reviews don't tell you much about the day to day and especially if you're looking to buy used.
Like there's nothing stopping forums to be formatted like Reddit and Discord for comments. Of course, that doesn't change young people's behavior but if you add search (most forums have a terrible interface for this), then people don't have to read.
Here's what I mean visually: https://imgur.com/a/forum-search-OhP1XvN
Why should he when an LLM will do that and prep a summary in a few seconds?
A week or so later, when I was helping him install the replacement part, I brought up the Tacoma forum and he basically said "I'm not reading ten pages of threads and their replies from 2009!"
Why should he when an LLM will do that and prep a summary in a few seconds?
I just mean we all read through 10 pages of someone else’s troubleshooting mostly because we had to, not cause it’s fun. He would have read it eventually if OP wasn’t there to help him.
I just mean we all read through 10 pages of someone else’s troubleshooting mostly because we had to, not cause it’s fun. He would have read it eventually if OP wasn’t there to help him.
I don't know what a usenet is, but I do miss forums, especially when you had a forum for each franchise/subject, forums still survive today to some degrees, there's that audio science one,...
I don't know what a usenet is, but I do miss forums, especially when you had a forum for each franchise/subject, forums still survive today to some degrees, there's that audio science one, somethingawful is still up, resetera, a couple of others I may have forgotten or don't remember...
But at the time I thought Social media especially twitter with its 140 character limit to be worse DMs, but up for everyone to see and search, I don't think anyone expected it to replace forums, essentially.
Sucks that reddit is the only place where it has community for specific things, like if I want to read about audio? I have either independent websites, or the IEMs/DAP/etc subreddits, ASR is its own horse. Want to see news or talk about handhelds? r/sbcgaming is pretty much it, some websites like retrododo talk about it. Want to talk about Etrian Odyssey or a specific game/franchise? Discord or Reddit, the one EO forum I know is pretty much abandoned despite not being exactly erased from net, it's just broken and no one posts in it.
This is something Ive noticed as well. I am a car guy and have had several older cars (not classic cars but more like 1990s and early 2000s) and because of that I spent a lot of time using forums....
Modern and especially younger audiences don't prefer to consume text
This is something Ive noticed as well.
I am a car guy and have had several older cars (not classic cars but more like 1990s and early 2000s) and because of that I spent a lot of time using forums. I still do but these days YouTube has a lot of car repairs videos for pretty much any car.
Recently, I had a younger relative ask me for help on his 07 Toyota Tacoma. He ran into a problem and couldn't find a solution on YouTube. Before I helped him, I told him to try searching a well known Tacoma forum and he couldn't find a solution on there either.
I started looking into it. about 30 minutes, some searching, and reading roughly 10 pages of a few different threads in this Tacoma forum and I found the solution.
A week or so later, when I was helping him install the replacement part, I brought up the Tacoma forum and he basically said "I'm not reading ten pages of threads and their replies from 2009!"
Interesting. Not sure how it happened, though it may have been because of bad coverage (I was commenting from work where I have terrible phone coverage and I may have tried refreshing the page...
Interesting. Not sure how it happened, though it may have been because of bad coverage (I was commenting from work where I have terrible phone coverage and I may have tried refreshing the page twice to see if the comment posted or not).
This is actually why I really love Tildes. I did dabble in USENET but other forums were soon more accessible (my go to was phpBB, which is only #4).
It's possibly the closest thing since the "Llamas on Fire" board (which was the #1 for me back in the day, and also where I met my SO) today, with an adequate mix of Reddit's good bits.
Older doesn't necessarily mean better, but I suspect if the internet was thrust back to USENET times, a lot of shifts would be made in a more positive direction.
I always had a mildly-insane idea kicking around in the back of my head along the lines of a next-gen, but low-tech Usenet, fully broadcasted on HAM and/or LoRA frequencies instead of the traditional channels.
Check out NomadNet and Sideband, built on top of Reticulum. @Jimmy
There's actual interesting history about this (side note: I have a HAM license, but haven't touched a radio in a long time). Packet Radio used to be a bit of a thing, with "digipeaters" that acted like regular HAM repeaters...and one of the Internet precursors, ALOHAnet, was a packet radio network.
The need for licensing would heavily limit adoption on HAM bands though. Something lower range on Part 15 spectrum is probably more viable. Like WiFi or BLE mesh networks. (BitChat is something along the latter lines.)
I'm usually slightly biased on decentralized tech because you do lose a lot of convenience/features/UX but Usenet on radio? Sign me up.
Please make this
Was interesting to find out about USENET, an early forum-like system which, by my understanding, predated the modern world wide web and used it's own custom protocols.
Also, I somehow missed the fact that "Discourse" is open-source. Now it makes sense why so many open-source communities use it... and it's pretty good and has A LOT of features.
Another cool aspect of USENET was that it was very distributed. People would use uucp to download news, discussion threads, and emails before responding to and resharing them on the peer-to-peer chain.
Just responding to agree with this XD I read this line from OP:
And made an audible HNNNGGGG sound as my soul departed the frail remains of body
(to OP: I'm glad you're learning about this stuff! Old people just occasionally get hit by the truck of time, and joking about the briefness of life helps with the 'ol existential dread. Please pay this no mind)
Don't feel bad. I'm a 2000s "kid" and even though not long ago I considered myself young, more and more things are reminding me the opposite these days. I still feel 18 inside :D
The first forums I came across were gaming related (counter-strike, runescape ...) at around 2013-2014. I can't say for all of them, but phpBB rings a strong bell for me so at least some of them must have been that.
When did Usenet stop being a thing, by the way? Late 90's like the article mentioned? And how did it differ from modern forums?
It still exists, so opinions on this will vary wildly depending on who you ask. Regardless it's worth noting that the decline/cultural shift of Usenet is the origin of the phrase "Eternal September" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
Usenet didn't stop being a thing. It has a surprisingly large userbase in the Netherlands and there are plenty of providers available. Usually Usenet is presented as the alternative to torrents.
I've never done Usenet, but have been aware of its existence since I started using computers as a kid in the late 90s. My understanding was it was a function of new groups of people getting online and starting with something else...much like how many people now only use the Web on a smartphone and only come in contact with a handful of companies providing centralized services. It's just what they're familiar with.
In the 90s, people joining the Internet were doing so for the Web, because it was the hot new thing (even if they didn't necessarily grasp that distinction). They were there for Yahoo and eBay and Hotmail and such. They clicked the blue E on Windows and used the paved road of software directing them to what they actually wanted. The typical person wasn't thinking about how networks work or picking out software.
Also, we had ISPs like America On Line, which were trying to build a curated gated community. So many people's experience with the Internet then was through that. One stop for email, web browsing and chat functionality. AIM was huge. My grandma was able to use AIM and make voice calls.
AOL actually predated the internet. It was originally an online network in the same general vein as prodigy and GEnie.
Oh man, I just remembered a relative on my mom's side of the family had a Prodigy email back then. Now I'm trying to remember the other proto-ISP that had a closed network. They're where GIF originated.
Edit: CompuServe
I was too young for that stage of computing. My family got our first computer in 1998 and we started with Juno and moved on to AOL a little later. (Then ADSL from a local ISP around 2005.)
Compuserve, AOL, and Prodigy were all BBS systems that evolved into the first major ISPs. The loss of geographically-bound (due to long distance call rates) online spaces is bittersweet.
I still vaguely remember browsing Cartoon Network stuff on the Prodigy BBS. It was considered the family-friendly option at the time, before my family switched to AOL, probably for price reasons.
Haha nice the Runeacape forums back in the day were feral, you’d get banned just for talking about politics cause it always turned into flaming.
It would be really cool to have something like Discourse, but less resource-hungry. Like a Go application that can be easily deployed to cheaper VPSes. A forum could even get away with an SQLite database, since it's heavy read, low write and expected to only have one server instance.
Tbh, there is very little wrong with old fashioned LAMP based forums like phpBB (which is still getting updates) or more modern Flarum. These will run on a lot of webhosting offerings as that is still what a lot of them offer. Takes away the need for you to maintain the VPS as well.
If you don't like using the LAMP stack there are other alternatives out there (for which you will need a VPS I suppose) like NodeBB as well which is Node.JS based.
I am sure you can make a reasonable forum in GO as well if you set out to do so. But forums, even seemingly simple ones, are fairly complex. A lot of the lightweight solutions people start out with are also light weight because they lack (often decades) of accumulated features, spam handling, moderation tooling, etc.
Most of the alternatives I mentioned will be less resource hungry than Discourse anyway (Heck, phpBB hasn't changed that much and ran fine on hardware from decades ago). Discourse had made some design choices that simply make it resource hungry. Less to do with the language (Which is Ruby ) and more with architecture.
I'm aware phpBB (and paid options like VBulletin and XenForo) are still kicking, and visit a few sites periodically that use them...but I'm not crazy about LAMP stuff (or JS anything, for that matter), despite it having been a formative part of my early forays into programming.
My line of thinking is that the way one spins up a web site has evolved over the years. In the early 2000s, paying a shared hosting provider and FTPing some PHP files that would run in their environment was fairly normal. But that's kind of outdated.
You get a lot more bang for your buck from somewhere like DigitalOcean, Linode, Hetzner, or AWS's VPS option (Light-something?)...and then are in the position of needing to set things up. It's actually easier to have a self-contained binary or JAR that runs its own server (which can be put behind nginx or Caddy) that can be installed through a package manager or Docker pull than messing with PHP-FPM to get your web root to process PHP files. Something like SQLite also removes a dependency on a database server and further reduces memory overhead. I envision aggressive in-process caching as well...especially in our world of LLM crawlers DDoSing forums.
It's something I've toyed with the idea of prototyping, but don't want to commit to or end up being responsible for supporting at this point in time.
I think this is fine in itself. It is not your preference and that is okay. The technical reasoning you are giving I do have some thoughts on which I just wanted to share in general. Feel free to skip all that, as I said having a tech stack preference is absolutely okay. I do also respond to the overall idea you have been toying with at the bottom if you are interested on my thoughts there.
Yup, that would be outdated ;) Shared webhosters have also evolved over the years, a lot of them these days offer SSH access as well with composer preinstalled. It is how you would install Flarum for example.
As far as bang for your bucks go, I am not so sure to be honest. It depends on what you consider to be the "bang" I guess. If you also want to host other stuff on the VPS from different stacks then absolutely. If it is just about decent performance (or better), lots of space and often a domain include then shared webhosters provide a pretty good bang for your buck. At least around these parts they do.
Many also offer one click installations from a web interface, which I am not a huge fan of myself but mostly because of control reasons. The times I tried it the software installed without issue.
Somewhat true, if you compare doing php stuff yourself on a VPS to other stuff. As I said, with a shared webhost you often also get composer included which means it is just a command line installation. And even on a VPS, php configuration is fairly straightforward and most modern php software is installed with a package manager like composer. Which does bring it on the same level as setting up docker properly and doing a docker pull imho.
And I would want to point out that running a JAR sits a bit awkwardly next to the resource argument. I'd say it would be on par with running PHP software.
Lobste.rs recently switched to SQLite, so it certainly is possible. Though they had quite some issues to work out since SQLite for all its pros also has quite a few idiosyncrasies compared to more traditional choices like MySQL or PostgreSQL. Just to be clear, Lobste.rs itself isn't a single package so I am purely using it as an example for the SQLite bit.
Memory overhead will be less, that is true. But it does come with a few tradeoffs like limited datatypes and a somewhat more complex backup situation as you can't just point a cron job to
mysqldump/pgdump. Full blown databases also do offer a bunch of additional nice features with that memory overhead. Certainly PostgreSQL can be really neat since it allows for structured storage of indexable json data.I was sitting on the lobste.rs IRC the other day when they were dealing with a wave of crawlers. In-process caching only does so much, since crawlers hit everything and hit deep. Post permalinks, profiles any dynamic endpoint unauthenticated users might hit.
A lot of those will never be in memory from recent usage, so you want other caching as well. On tildes it isn't doing as part of caching, but when logged out a bunch of dynamic pages are also limited. User profiles for example don't do pagination for logged out users. This limits what crawlers can and also would make caching a lot easier.
I do agree that smart caching can help a ton in mitigating the impact of bad crawlers once they arrive. But, ideally you want to prevent them from getting their digital grubby fingers on whatever tech stack you are building your forum on. Which means things like rate limiting, Anubis, Cloudflare and/or ASN blocking although results from these also vary and they can negatively impact users as well.
Very understandable! Like I said, forum software is fairly complex. Certainly when you are providing it to others, as you can't get away with doing some things through queries by hand as you would for something you only use.
I do think that GO would be an excellent choice regardless if you ever decide to go through with it. It might not look like it with the way I defended the good old LAMP stack, but I always welcome new initiatives for community platforms :)
The term you're looking for is Amazon Lightsail, fyi.
Personally, I think for blogs you can absolutely get away with a LAMP stack, or even less. My personal blog is running on a DigitalOcean VPS using AlmaLinux and Apache HTTP server, I just write markdown files and use a static site generator. I have SSL set up but there's not much for it to cover, the files are uploaded via
rsyncand there's nowhere for readers to submit anything to the server - there's not even a search box, just tags/categories that viewers can click. Prior to the current setup, it was running Wordpress (which is the poster child for LAMP) but I realized it had more features than I cared about and pared it down. Honestly, I think knowing where to upload files is the biggest barrier to this kind of setup being more common.I really enjoyed the history lesson of the article, although as someone who's making a modern forum, its very hard for me to agree with the conclusion that forums lost out due to novelty. There's a myriad of reasons that forums lost, I'll just list 3 obvious ones:
Tildes is another great example of a modern, intentionally designed, text-based forum.
PS: There's a link on my profile for my project if you are curious.
This is something Ive noticed as well.
I am a car guy and have had several older cars (not classic cars but more like 1990s and early 2000s) and because of that I spent a lot of time using forums. I still do but these days YouTube has a lot of car repairs videos for pretty much any car.
Recently, I had a younger relative ask me for help on his 07 Toyota Tacoma. He ran into a problem and couldn't find a solution on YouTube. Before I helped him, I told him to try searching a well known Tacoma forum and he couldn't find a solution on there either.
I started looking into it. about 30 minutes, some searching, and reading roughly 10 pages of a few different threads in this Tacoma forum and I found the solution.
A week or so later, when I was helping him install the replacement part, I brought up the Tacoma forum and he basically said "I'm not reading ten pages of threads and their replies from 2009!"
Great story!
I am not as into cars as you but back in the day I was lurking in a few Aston Martin forums like a submarine cuz I wanted to get a feel what its like owning one. YouTube reviews don't tell you much about the day to day and especially if you're looking to buy used.
Like there's nothing stopping forums to be formatted like Reddit and Discord for comments. Of course, that doesn't change young people's behavior but if you add search (most forums have a terrible interface for this), then people don't have to read.
Here's what I mean visually: https://imgur.com/a/forum-search-OhP1XvN
Why should he when an LLM will do that and prep a summary in a few seconds?
Why read when the above poster ended up doing it for him anyway?
Sometimes car people like working on cars so we'll help out others even if they don't want to ready 10 pages of other people's troubleshooting.
I just mean we all read through 10 pages of someone else’s troubleshooting mostly because we had to, not cause it’s fun. He would have read it eventually if OP wasn’t there to help him.
I don't know what a usenet is, but I do miss forums, especially when you had a forum for each franchise/subject, forums still survive today to some degrees, there's that audio science one, somethingawful is still up, resetera, a couple of others I may have forgotten or don't remember...
But at the time I thought Social media especially twitter with its 140 character limit to be worse DMs, but up for everyone to see and search, I don't think anyone expected it to replace forums, essentially.
Sucks that reddit is the only place where it has community for specific things, like if I want to read about audio? I have either independent websites, or the IEMs/DAP/etc subreddits, ASR is its own horse. Want to see news or talk about handhelds? r/sbcgaming is pretty much it, some websites like retrododo talk about it. Want to talk about Etrian Odyssey or a specific game/franchise? Discord or Reddit, the one EO forum I know is pretty much abandoned despite not being exactly erased from net, it's just broken and no one posts in it.
This is something Ive noticed as well.
I am a car guy and have had several older cars (not classic cars but more like 1990s and early 2000s) and because of that I spent a lot of time using forums. I still do but these days YouTube has a lot of car repairs videos for pretty much any car.
Recently, I had a younger relative ask me for help on his 07 Toyota Tacoma. He ran into a problem and couldn't find a solution on YouTube. Before I helped him, I told him to try searching a well known Tacoma forum and he couldn't find a solution on there either.
I started looking into it. about 30 minutes, some searching, and reading roughly 10 pages of a few different threads in this Tacoma forum and I found the solution.
A week or so later, when I was helping him install the replacement part, I brought up the Tacoma forum and he basically said "I'm not reading ten pages of threads and their replies from 2009!"
You double commented this, btw.
Interesting. Not sure how it happened, though it may have been because of bad coverage (I was commenting from work where I have terrible phone coverage and I may have tried refreshing the page twice to see if the comment posted or not).