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Just a few linodes run them all and we tend to have low thousands of concurrent users at any time but can comfortably handle high hundreds of thousands of guest

by buro9 9y ago

Just a few linodes run them all and we tend to have low thousands of concurrent users at any time but can comfortably handle high hundreds of thousands of guests. A friend and I wrote a forum platform for them :) As a startup that didn't get anywhere, but the main premise was that forum hosting is expensive (almost 1 server per forum, not very optimised for caching, every page is dynamic, etc) due to them not being on a true platform (shared costs, optimisations, and less waste in CPU and bandwidth), and we also hypothesised that forums have a natural life and when they die they cross-pollinate new forums (total growth in user engagement across communities continues even when a single community dies)... hence it's best to make a platform, and that the reduced costs for all actually makes them financially viable (though when we shut the startup I chose non-advertising and to do donations instead). This is the forum platform: https://microco.sm https://microco.sm but it's not really open for new forums, as I manually have to enable them and I'm concerned about future offboarding requests (not something I support at all). This is an example of a forum on the platform: https://www.lfgss.com https://www.lfgss.com which is the largest, but there are just shy of 300 on a wide range of topics.

alex_hitchins 9y ago
Thanks for taking the time to give a detailed answer. I'll have a look at the links you included. Sounds like you were on to a decent idea with regards to re-thinking how forums can be built/operate.
- buro9 9y ago
  It gets even weirder when you look at the fact that we put structured objects in forums... such as events: https://www.lfgss.com/events/3931/ https://www.lfgss.com/events/3931/ We thought we were on to a good thing... but couldn't secure the A round in London. The seed only gets you so far.
  - alex_hitchins 9y ago
    Are you looking to make this open source or keep it under wraps and try again?
    - buro9 9y ago
      It already is open-source... https://github.com/microcosm-cc/ https://github.com/microcosm-cc/ but as it was designed to be a platform I cannot claim it is easy for anyone to install or get started with it. I have a slow burning background task to move it from PostgreSQL + Go + Python + Django to PostgreSQL + Go. This will make it a super easy single-binary install, that can also scale out by simply running multiple versions of the Go binary in different modes (API or Web). But frankly... this is a very slow burning background task :)

by buro9 9y ago

alex_hitchins 9y ago

Thanks for taking the time to give a detailed answer. I'll have a look at the links you included. Sounds like you were on to a decent idea with regards to re-thinking how forums can be built/operate.

buro9 9y ago
It gets even weirder when you look at the fact that we put structured objects in forums... such as events: https://www.lfgss.com/events/3931/ https://www.lfgss.com/events/3931/ We thought we were on to a good thing... but couldn't secure the A round in London. The seed only gets you so far.
- alex_hitchins 9y ago
  Are you looking to make this open source or keep it under wraps and try again?
  - buro9 9y ago
    It already is open-source... https://github.com/microcosm-cc/ https://github.com/microcosm-cc/ but as it was designed to be a platform I cannot claim it is easy for anyone to install or get started with it. I have a slow burning background task to move it from PostgreSQL + Go + Python + Django to PostgreSQL + Go. This will make it a super easy single-binary install, that can also scale out by simply running multiple versions of the Go binary in different modes (API or Web). But frankly... this is a very slow burning background task :)