cerca.mdwn (1867B)
1 **Cerca** is a web forum software built to service small trust-based 2 communities and focuses on enabling longform, longer-term discussions. It is 3 architected to minimize maintenance and hosting costs by carefully choosing 4 which features it supports, how they work, and which features are intentionally 5 omitted. It features private threads, a flexible user-driven category system, 6 an RSS feed for receiving news of forum activity, and a web interface for 7 managing invites, adding and removing users. As a forum software, it also 8 prioritizes transparency by logging all administrator actions in a view 9 accessible by all forum members, and post deletion + edits are restricted 10 solely to post authors. 11 12 13 Relevance to permacomputing 14 --------------------------- 15 16 Cerca is built following a [collapse 17 informatics](https://damaged.bleu255.com/Collapse_Informatics/) approach i.e. 18 making the best of what we have today for a potentially more depleted tomorrow. 19 Its development is mindful of permacomputing constraints while simultaneously 20 weighing them against deployment, user experience, and longer-term developer 21 interests. In general, it is a forum software that is easy to deploy 22 (respectful resource utilisation), easy to work on (low cognitive load), and 23 easy to maintain (few external systems and dependencies). 24 25 26 Limits and challenges 27 --------------------- 28 29 Being part of the [[Golang|Go]] ecosystem, it relies mostly on [[Big Tech]] 30 development infrastructure, and its existence is dependent on upstream changes 31 from Alphabet/Google. While the platform owners are somewhat careful with 32 breaking changes, their change in policies have already impacted Cerca by 33 impacting how dependencies must be kept up to date, 34 [example](https://github.com/cblgh/cerca/pull/89#issuecomment-2486083652). 35 36 37 Links 38 ----- 39 40 - <https://cblgh.org/cerca> 41 - <https://github.com/cblgh/cerca> 42