Microcosm Alternatives

microcosm reviews and mentions

• I must announce the immediate end of service of SSLPing
  5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Apr 2022

  For reference, this is roughly what I have... still not looking to sell today (that also takes time and brain cycles) but this is what I wrote in an email to someone enquiring by email after I posted this morning:

  So I wasn't looking to sell when I wrote the comment on HN, but the gist is: 8 years ago I created a platform for forums, it's a PostgreSQL database with a Go API layer. It's multi-tenant by default, so hosting many forums on a single server or cluster is trivial. That much is solid, and well maintained. But... I am not a front-end person and with that in mind I had the frontend built in Python + Django originally... it has no database, it's a pure veneer over the API just to use common templating for making the HTML. This part has not been maintained... it's 8 years out of date, Python 2.

  The platform I run has a number of sites on it, and I'm loosely aware that over the years other people had spun up instances of their own (it was open source, but feeling responsible for the lack of updates I hid that recently).

  Examples of sites using it:

  * https://www.lfgss.com (the biggest site on it)

  * https://pignolefixe.microco.sm/ (a french site)

  * https://forum.espruino.com (something to do with arduino and javascript)

  * https://forum.islington.cc (a pretty strong site)

  * https://forum.rapha.cc/ (a private members club)

  A common theme is cycling.

  The entire thing is secure, privacy focused, very low effort to run. There are no adverts, no tracking, no stats... but web logs say that I served 1.5M HTTP requests in the last 24 hours (to now) and that's behind a well configured Cloudflare cache (those not signed in hit cache for 5 minutes, only those signed in get dynamic HTML).

  So that's why I have... a forum platform. Oh... what differentiates this forum platform? It has events... in fact the platform is bespoke, the idea when I started it was to have things like classifieds, events, polls, forms, wiki all be native top-level content within a forum. I never liked on vBulletin or Reddit how you'd have to leave the forum to collaborate beyond conversations so I was trying to bring it all into the forum (and thus compete with MeetUp, eBay, etc... who don't have communities and wish they did).

  I still don't know if I'm necessarily looking to sell... but if we get to the point that the frontend server fails in some horrible way, the Python + Django being 8 years old probably means the effort to get it working is too much. I did realise this, and started a frontend in Go to replace the Django one (I can maintain Go code) https://github.com/buro9/microcosm but you can see the lack of progress... I joined fast growing startups and my career accelerated too, that doesn't leave time for side projects.