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Show HN: Anonymous, ephemeral, distributed forum/message board (github.com)

2 points by mmb ↗ HN
This project started out as an easy to run temporary forum/message board for use during emergencies or in areas with no internet. I've run it on an old router with ddwrt that's not connected to the internet.

It's still that, but I added an optional feature to pull posts from other instances of itself which I think creates some interesting distributed use cases. Distributing the posts to other instances can overcome some of the limitations of it being in-memory only.

3 comments

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LinuxBender
That looks really cool. What's the biggest memory usage one of the instances has ever climbed to? Is it first-in, first-out when the memory limit is reached? I assume if people are uploading binary content it would grow rather fast. Some screenshots in the repo would be nice.
mmb
The posts are text only so the memory usage doesn't grow very fast. You can post images using Markdown but the images themselves have to be hosted elsewhere. I've created a few million posts on a development laptop and the memory usage was not bad (can't remember the exact number).

Right now there is no memory limit or handling for when memory reaches a certain point. Pruning based on FIFO or fewest replies could work, or OS level techniques to handle memory limitations like swap.

I will add some screenshots to the repo. Thanks for the suggestion.

LinuxBender
You can post images using Markdown but the images themselves have to be hosted elsewhere.

Ah I see. That's easy enough, though I have found people nowadays find that to be too much friction. Old timers are good with it as that is all they had on IRC assuming DCC was disabled as it should be. The current generation expects files to be hosted by the same platform.

In terms of memory the one thing I would want to avoid is swap. Slowness aside it is on disk and data can be recovered from it and automating mounting encrypted swap adds a weakness as well. ZRAM can add some compression to memory. [1] I think your idea of pruning replies matches the current pattern used by sites with space restrictions. Great work, I hope more people follow in your footsteps and also contribute to your code.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zram