This forum can't be enshittified
I think we've actually beaten enshittification here, and I want to explain why.
Every post on this site is a plain text file. There's a short header and then the body. The database is just a cache that gets rebuilt from those files with ./v3 rebuild, so the whole forum can be cloned with git and run somewhere else.
Your identity is your PGP key. If this site ever goes bad, you take your key and your posts and leave.
If the server goes down, your browser still has a copy of the recent threads and you can keep reading.
Changing it is easy too. A new theme is one CSS file and one line in a registry (someone made a Word 97 theme). New features are small text formats with a short spec each. Feature requests are threads here, and approved ones can be handed off to a coding agent to implement. It's PHP, SQLite and text files, so it runs on a cheap VPS.
So there's nothing for a future owner to lock up. The posts are in git, the keys are yours, and the roadmap is a thread anyone can reply to.
Code: https://github.com/gulkily/v3
#
I think we've actually beaten enshittification here, and I want to explain why.
Every post on this site is a plain text file. There's a short header and then the body. The database is just a cache that gets rebuilt from those files with ./v3 rebuild, so the whole forum can be cloned with git and run somewhere else.
Your identity is your PGP key. If this site ever goes bad, you take your key and your posts and leave.
If the server goes down, your browser still has a copy of the recent threads and you can keep reading.
Changing it is easy too. A new theme is one CSS file and one line in a registry (someone made a Word 97 theme). New features are small text formats with a short spec each. Feature requests are threads here, and approved ones can be handed off to a coding agent to implement. It's PHP, SQLite and text files, so it runs on a cheap VPS.
So there's nothing for a future owner to lock up. The posts are in git, the keys are yours, and the roadmap is a thread anyone can reply to.
Code: https://github.com/gulkily/v3