> I haven't heard a single reason for holding off federation from Moxie (and the "best" reason I currently can come up with is that he has issues letting go of "his baby", other reasons being more nefarious).
I mean, there's no need to speculate here. There's an entire blog post on signal written about why they chose not to federate just a quick google search for 'signal federation' away, and the reasons, whether you agree with them or not, are pretty solid and sound.
When you'd add a comment to a blog post on Greymatter, it would write that content to it's own flatfile database, then trigger a rendering update which would read the content, transform it with a template, and produce a new .html file, overwriting the old one. Bam! Dynamic site based on (mostly) static pages.
I don't see why a forum or social platform couldn't be built in a similar manner. You won't be able to do much in the way of per-user authorization, but as long as all your content is supposed to be viewable to everyone, you should be OK.
One problem with Greymatter was that if a thread or site grew large, sometimes generating new files from templates would take so long that your connection to the CGI would time out before they were finished. Another problem was that two updates to the site posted at about the same time could stomp on each other during the rendering phase.
'Cause hey, flatfiles are hard. That's why I wouldn't forgo using a real database in favor of flatfiles. If you don't want to run MySQL or Postgres on an RPI, then use SQLite. There is, after all, a reason that these products exist. Let SQLite or MySQL deal with the flatfiles for your instead of re-inventing yet another wheel.
I also wouldn't update the .html files the moment someone posted. I'd have the scripts just commit the post to the database, and then regularly re-render the files from a cron script. This avoids having your rendering stage stomp on each other, provided that the rendering time is less than your rendering interval.
I logged into a chat that room my friends and I hang out in a few days ago, and mentioned that 'Time' was still going.
Then it occurred to me: I wonder if that is the punchline. Randall sits back and cackles with glee as thousands of otherwise intelligent people wake up every morning and exclaim to their friends, with complete surprise: "Hey guys! Time is still going!"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States