Lobsters

This is the quite sad source code to the ghost town at https://lobste.rs It is a Rails codebase and uses a SQL (MariaDB in production) backend for the database. (No relation to the self-help guru.)

You are free to use this code to start your own sister site because the code is available under a permissive license (3-clause BSD). We welcome bug reports and code contributions that help use improve lobste.rs. As a volunteer project we're reluctant to take on work that's not useful to our site, so please understand if we don't want to adopt your custom feature.

As of February 2025 we have a Zulip-based chat room to discuss the codebase and offer limited support to owners of sister sites like warnings about breaking changes and vulnerability announcements. If you run a site using the codebase, you will benefit from joining!