Some of the cited reasons for moving off MariaDB [1] seem misguided, in my opinion. Especially the part about "K1 are very enterprise-focused, so the database is likely to focus its work on features that are not relevant to us. There's increased risk they drop the free/open source version we use"
K1 acquired the commercial entity behind MariaDB Enterprise, but that's separate from the non-profit MariaDB Foundation. And there's literally zero risk of the MariaDB server suddenly going closed-source; as a fork of MySQL (which is GPL), this is not even legally possible!
The GPLv2 doesn't prevent a company from distributing binaries and making the source available on request while development is done behind closed doors. This wouldn't really be "open source" as we typically understand it and might be cause to exclude it from some Linux distros, for example. I'm not saying that K1 would do this (I have no idea who they are or what they do), but I also think it's a reasonable risk to consider.
And even if it did go closed-souce, your existing install can run for ages because the vendor cannot force upgrade. One of my favorite features of FOSS.
SQLite definitely seems like a poor choice for dealing with many concurrent requests.
Maybe it's improved since I last used it, but to my knowledge SQLite essentially forces all writes to be serialised, at risk of data corruption otherwise.
There are tricks for improving the performance such as WALs, but that is merely a performance boost rather than genuine concurrency with things like row-level locks that you might find in other databases.
I guess if the whole thing is architected with a write-through cache that handles concurrent writes and deals with serialising all the writes, then it can be a single writer streaming changes through to the database, but then you still have a point of serialisation, it just will manifest itself slightly differently.
And SQLite is something that will give you constraints you will always have to consider.
Whereas running mariadb or postgres on the same machine would deliver similar benefits without a risky migration.
If your DB is small enough to run as a SQLite database, then it probably ought to have never been on a different machine in the first place.
There is a very happy medium between SQLite and a database on a different machine, one I am continually surprised to see people ignore.
Invitation-only is the future of online communities. Lobsters still has a pulse because you need to know someone to get in and it’s a bad look if you invite annoying people.
> Invitation-only is the future of online communities.
This feels antithetical/dystopian/elitist compared to what online communities are, for me. I think it's ok for some communities to be like this, but I don't think it's the future of online communities.
I wish lobste.rs would be a tiny bit easier to get access to. Some of my blog posts have been discussed there and every time I try to get access, I can’t get past their IRC stuff.
I've been waiting for my lobste.rs invite for years. I joined the IRC for a few days, but being in Australia, rarely saw too much activity. I could chase someone down for an invite, but at that point I just don't care that much.
FWIW, you might want to consider publishing your e-mail address in your HN profile or on your website. Otherwise it’s hard for people to get in touch with you.
That's nonsense wrt invitation-only being the future. I can equally say that free speech is the future. For comparison, Reddit does very well without being invitation only.
Lobste.rs is very anti-AI. They force any LLM topic to be tagged with “vibecoding” even when the majority of LLM posts are not about vibecoding.
AI posts are usually the most commented on. Linus Torvalds’ comments saying that LLMs are actually useful is still on the front page, tagged as vibecoding, and has a lot of comments from people mostly disagreeing with him.
Lobste.rs is more of a monoculture than Hacker News. If you get downvoted enough they stick a banner on the top of the page inviting you to delete your account. It has a nasty side effect of driving away good contributors who don’t align perfectly with the hive mind. It’s a site where you learn to keep your mouth shut if your input doesn’t agree with what the core users want to hear.
It's a lot smaller of a community than HN, so it will naturally have a smaller range of opinions merely due to the fact that it has a lot fewer users.
That said, I don't believe it's as much of a hivemind as you've portrayed. I've seen dissenting opinions voiced there which weren't downvoted (or at least not noticeably), while the same opinion in a similar thread here on HN would be downvoted and flagged. So I don't think that getting downvoted enough so that you're invited to delete your account is a common occurrence with productive members.
I dont remember why I was kind of barred from lobsters , but I applaud all this behavior you mentioned. In the end, that's how normal clickes of friends/interest groups form (or formed 30 years ago in real life.)
If you got into my group of death metal people, and suddenly started talking about Oasis... we would invite you to get out haha.
Same with patriots.win . They may be a group of right wing biggots, but hey, they did their platform and are happy talking there.
Lobsters has other problems too. The owner occasionally steals credit from posters, changing the author of posts to his own friends, also taking all the credit for it away. Debating the owner's action results in a ban.
It's a wonderful place. It feels like HN, but with the Silicon Valley attitude dialed way way way down, and with a much narrower scope (politics, economics and entrepreneurship are all off-topic, for example).
I didn't realize that re-timestamped comments. That's a pretty unexpected behavior, if true. I wouldn't like if that happened to a comment I left - a lot can happen in a week.
For a relatively low-traffic site like Lobster's, yeah I'm not surprised they don't need anything crazy. SQLite is really efficient and modern hardware is really fast.
Another SQLite user here. My site gets constantly hammered by crawlers, and SQLite just keeps going on hit miss. Anyway, the real magic is on the ram and the ssd perf.
sqlite for a site that debates database migrations is like a chef who eats microwave dinners at home. makes perfect sense and somehow still feels like a betrayal.
I think HN is better. Lobste.rs has too much monocultural pressure.
That's not necessarily a bad thing, but honestly, as a foreigner, I have limited English vocabulary, so I end up getting stressed out over being judged as AI. At least here, the admin DEN kindly understood my situation and let me participate after getting permission. But when I look at subreddits and other communities, the stronger the monocultural management, the more fan-like sentiment tends to grow, making it harder for minority voices to speak up.
I'm in favor of LLMs (since being for or against LLMs inevitably depends on regional context—I personally find LLM translation incredibly convenient and helpful), but there are moments when I find it hard to argue against blanket opposition or certain topics. I thought about why that is, and I think it's because Lobste.rs has high-quality posts, but since it's inviet only, the cultural barrier to entry is high, and judgment itself is part of the community identity. It's more about signals like 'are you the same kind of person as us' than logical counterarguments. The community is small, so the same core users appear across many topics, and the reputation built there follows you around, making it closed off to minority opinions.
HN, on the other hand, isn't really a single community but a mix of many groups—startup founders, big-tech engineers, and independent developers like me. Depending on who happens to be reading at that time, the comment sentiment often shifts. And since there are so many readers, even if I say something on one thread, it's unlikely anyone will recognize me in the next.
So Lobste.rs feels like a hard place for an outsider to fit into.
I've heard "why not PostgreSQL?" a few times this week. It was even our original plan in #539! Well, it was a pragmatic choice in two different ways:
The person who volunteered to do the work used SQLite.
I don't want to use solutions that are bigger and more complex than our likely needs. Postgresql is my default for projects, but it does have the added complexity of being a separate service to run, tune, and maintain.
Citation needed. I love postgres as much as the next person, but it does have more overhead than Sqlite which is in an in-process db linked through compiled C code, it doesn't run as a separate server. Very significant difference that when you use Sqlite db, there is typically no db process other than your application logic, unless you implement the server yourself. If you don't want your application to have multiple processes (say, as a toy example) then it totally makes sense to prefer Sqlite just for this reason. Sqlite and postgres are different tools, they serve different purposes.
On the same machine where they are currently storing the sqlite file maybe? It's not that hard to run. A sqlite backup cron is also not that much more work than a pg_dump cron.
Some of the cited reasons for moving off MariaDB [1] seem misguided, in my opinion. Especially the part about "K1 are very enterprise-focused, so the database is likely to focus its work on features that are not relevant to us. There's increased risk they drop the free/open source version we use"
K1 acquired the commercial entity behind MariaDB Enterprise, but that's separate from the non-profit MariaDB Foundation. And there's literally zero risk of the MariaDB server suddenly going closed-source; as a fork of MySQL (which is GPL), this is not even legally possible!
[1] https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/issues/539#issuecomment...
The GPLv2 doesn't prevent a company from distributing binaries and making the source available on request while development is done behind closed doors. This wouldn't really be "open source" as we typically understand it and might be cause to exclude it from some Linux distros, for example. I'm not saying that K1 would do this (I have no idea who they are or what they do), but I also think it's a reasonable risk to consider.
And even if it did go closed-souce, your existing install can run for ages because the vendor cannot force upgrade. One of my favorite features of FOSS.
How could it go closed source?
This makes little sense but I guess they get little traffic so pretty much any database will work for them.
If traffic grows they will find problems, then limitations, then move to postgres. And if not it's fine. Story old as time.
It's been fairly unstable recently, pages sometimes render for several seconds which I've never seen under MariaDB. Used to be instantaneous, always.
Sometimes (maybe 5% or less) the request won't render at all, and you get a browser error page.
Today they ran into this bug, lost a bunch of voting data, and went into read-only mode for several hours:
https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/57128
I wonder how much of this is usual bugs which crop up during major database migrations, and how much is caused by choice of SQLite.
SQLite definitely seems like a poor choice for dealing with many concurrent requests.
Maybe it's improved since I last used it, but to my knowledge SQLite essentially forces all writes to be serialised, at risk of data corruption otherwise.
There are tricks for improving the performance such as WALs, but that is merely a performance boost rather than genuine concurrency with things like row-level locks that you might find in other databases.
I guess if the whole thing is architected with a write-through cache that handles concurrent writes and deals with serialising all the writes, then it can be a single writer streaming changes through to the database, but then you still have a point of serialisation, it just will manifest itself slightly differently.
And SQLite is something that will give you constraints you will always have to consider.
Whereas running mariadb or postgres on the same machine would deliver similar benefits without a risky migration.
If your DB is small enough to run as a SQLite database, then it probably ought to have never been on a different machine in the first place.
There is a very happy medium between SQLite and a database on a different machine, one I am continually surprised to see people ignore.
Pages (especially threads while logged in) taking seconds to load definitely happened to me pre SQLite migration.
Does HN still use simple files for storing its data?
Oh wow. Off-topic but quite refreshing to see a site not absolutely plastered in AI posts
HN is increasingly bot central, I kind of assume 80% of the respondents are artificial.
Lobsters still got a pulse, largely.
Invitation-only is the future of online communities. Lobsters still has a pulse because you need to know someone to get in and it’s a bad look if you invite annoying people.
> Invitation-only is the future of online communities.
This feels antithetical/dystopian/elitist compared to what online communities are, for me. I think it's ok for some communities to be like this, but I don't think it's the future of online communities.
I wish lobste.rs would be a tiny bit easier to get access to. Some of my blog posts have been discussed there and every time I try to get access, I can’t get past their IRC stuff.
As in: I just don’t understand how IRC works…
I've been waiting for my lobste.rs invite for years. I joined the IRC for a few days, but being in Australia, rarely saw too much activity. I could chase someone down for an invite, but at that point I just don't care that much.
FWIW, you might want to consider publishing your e-mail address in your HN profile or on your website. Otherwise it’s hard for people to get in touch with you.
im sorry but maybe connecting to irc is a bit of a filter on the users they expect. especially with ai it should be almost no effort.
That's nonsense wrt invitation-only being the future. I can equally say that free speech is the future. For comparison, Reddit does very well without being invitation only.
reddit does okay from a profit standpoint. reddit does terribly for a bot or even a good community standpoint.
That's an unsubstantiated and false accusation wrt the 80%. If you believe it, why are you even here? Are you one of them?
Lobste.rs is very anti-AI. They force any LLM topic to be tagged with “vibecoding” even when the majority of LLM posts are not about vibecoding.
AI posts are usually the most commented on. Linus Torvalds’ comments saying that LLMs are actually useful is still on the front page, tagged as vibecoding, and has a lot of comments from people mostly disagreeing with him.
Lobste.rs is more of a monoculture than Hacker News. If you get downvoted enough they stick a banner on the top of the page inviting you to delete your account. It has a nasty side effect of driving away good contributors who don’t align perfectly with the hive mind. It’s a site where you learn to keep your mouth shut if your input doesn’t agree with what the core users want to hear.
It's a lot smaller of a community than HN, so it will naturally have a smaller range of opinions merely due to the fact that it has a lot fewer users.
That said, I don't believe it's as much of a hivemind as you've portrayed. I've seen dissenting opinions voiced there which weren't downvoted (or at least not noticeably), while the same opinion in a similar thread here on HN would be downvoted and flagged. So I don't think that getting downvoted enough so that you're invited to delete your account is a common occurrence with productive members.
With regard to its small size, that's not why. They have for a long while been actively snd intentionally hostile to AI.
Driving away silicon valley tech bros who spend most of their time boosting AI is actually a prerequisite for building a good community.
I dont remember why I was kind of barred from lobsters , but I applaud all this behavior you mentioned. In the end, that's how normal clickes of friends/interest groups form (or formed 30 years ago in real life.)
If you got into my group of death metal people, and suddenly started talking about Oasis... we would invite you to get out haha.
Same with patriots.win . They may be a group of right wing biggots, but hey, they did their platform and are happy talking there.
Lobsters has other problems too. The owner occasionally steals credit from posters, changing the author of posts to his own friends, also taking all the credit for it away. Debating the owner's action results in a ban.
I honestly don’t find any of this concerning
The concern usually only comes when you fall on the "outside" of the prevailing opinion within the group of people voting on comments.
edit: my response isn't about lobste.rs. I don't have an account there.
It's a wonderful place. It feels like HN, but with the Silicon Valley attitude dialed way way way down, and with a much narrower scope (politics, economics and entrepreneurship are all off-topic, for example).
Huh. I’ve largely avoided it, but that does sound pretty nice.
The site is performing poorly for me. For example, the login page took 9 seconds to load, same with the home page.
I hope it's profitable, because this feels like engineering for engineering sake and not actually improving the product in a way that draws customers.
Ironically, this post resurfaced on HN with my comment here shown as if made 15 minutes ago, which I in reality did last week?
Second chance pool, most likely.
I didn't realize that re-timestamped comments. That's a pretty unexpected behavior, if true. I wouldn't like if that happened to a comment I left - a lot can happen in a week.
Wait, no edge cache, just one node with SQLite db?
For a relatively low-traffic site like Lobster's, yeah I'm not surprised they don't need anything crazy. SQLite is really efficient and modern hardware is really fast.
Caddy does cache a portion of the traffic, and what it can't cache makes its way to rails.
Another SQLite user here. My site gets constantly hammered by crawlers, and SQLite just keeps going on hit miss. Anyway, the real magic is on the ram and the ssd perf.
> keeps going on hit miss
(Is this a typo?)
sqlite for a site that debates database migrations is like a chef who eats microwave dinners at home. makes perfect sense and somehow still feels like a betrayal.
I'd appreciate a lobste.rs invite if anyone has one. Email is in my profile. Thanks!
May I have an invite, if anyone has one to spare?
I think HN is better. Lobste.rs has too much monocultural pressure.
That's not necessarily a bad thing, but honestly, as a foreigner, I have limited English vocabulary, so I end up getting stressed out over being judged as AI. At least here, the admin DEN kindly understood my situation and let me participate after getting permission. But when I look at subreddits and other communities, the stronger the monocultural management, the more fan-like sentiment tends to grow, making it harder for minority voices to speak up.
I'm in favor of LLMs (since being for or against LLMs inevitably depends on regional context—I personally find LLM translation incredibly convenient and helpful), but there are moments when I find it hard to argue against blanket opposition or certain topics. I thought about why that is, and I think it's because Lobste.rs has high-quality posts, but since it's inviet only, the cultural barrier to entry is high, and judgment itself is part of the community identity. It's more about signals like 'are you the same kind of person as us' than logical counterarguments. The community is small, so the same core users appear across many topics, and the reputation built there follows you around, making it closed off to minority opinions.
HN, on the other hand, isn't really a single community but a mix of many groups—startup founders, big-tech engineers, and independent developers like me. Depending on who happens to be reading at that time, the comment sentiment often shifts. And since there are so many readers, even if I say something on one thread, it's unlikely anyone will recognize me in the next.
So Lobste.rs feels like a hard place for an outsider to fit into.
No intention to antagonize but... why not postgre? Even my side projects run on postgresql with no overhead at all
It's also explained in the post shared:
---
I've heard "why not PostgreSQL?" a few times this week. It was even our original plan in #539! Well, it was a pragmatic choice in two different ways:
The person who volunteered to do the work used SQLite.
I don't want to use solutions that are bigger and more complex than our likely needs. Postgresql is my default for projects, but it does have the added complexity of being a separate service to run, tune, and maintain.
> run on postgresql with no overhead at all
Citation needed. I love postgres as much as the next person, but it does have more overhead than Sqlite which is in an in-process db linked through compiled C code, it doesn't run as a separate server. Very significant difference that when you use Sqlite db, there is typically no db process other than your application logic, unless you implement the server yourself. If you don't want your application to have multiple processes (say, as a toy example) then it totally makes sense to prefer Sqlite just for this reason. Sqlite and postgres are different tools, they serve different purposes.
Where are you hosting postgres
On the same machine where they are currently storing the sqlite file maybe? It's not that hard to run. A sqlite backup cron is also not that much more work than a pg_dump cron.