A Lindy Tech Stack (For Reference Only)
no judgement, just facts
guess which project is built on this stack
answer below the fold
- Ruby on Rails
- mariadb
- nginx
- DigitalOcean VPS hosting
- DNSimple DNS hosting
- restic backups on b2
- Pushover notifications
- Hatchbox provisioning
Clues: 13+ years, ~2500 MAU and constant, controlled growth. No ads, no outside funding. Many novel social curation features1. Transparent but gatekept (permissioned, curated).
first, an Aside
about the recent blowups at Bluesky, with CEO Jay Graber amplifying a known racist and transphobic account and users wanting to cancel her for troll-y responses including memes of WAFFLES2, my friend netopwibby wrote:
the Reveal
The project mentioned up top is Lobsters.
They're invite-only, with opinionated and explicit social norms.
They say upfront:
If you dislike the content or moderation policies here, you may prefer Y Combinator News, r/programming, Slashdot, Tilde News, or comp.*. Or you could use our codebase to start your own site.
It's the opposite of self-serve curation, but it allows sovereign self-identification of people who agree with the transparent policies laid out upfront.
When I first read netopwibby's observation, I thought the key concept was the GFY 'tude. No, the key word in there is "constantly".
When you have many individual human beings with freedom, it's good to set clear, simple, transparent expectations (and stick to them!). The attention economy is self-regulating: users go where appeal outweighs drawbacks.
When the platform owner is constantly telling interested, invested users to go away, it's a sign of:
- scale, i.e., success
- fk'd policies, i.e., failure of execution
- poor comms, i.e., failure of leadership
FWIW, the thinkers I tend to get the most satisfaction from following, do NOT operate well within such highly restrictive norms. Call it, an underappreciation of the delights of "polite society".
However, the Lobsters norms do seem to provide an effective structure and safe space for serious communication, as well as cozy conversations.