Hey everyone,

I have been working on this side-project with myself and a couple friends over the past few years and I think it is approaching a state in which I can start publicly sharing it. Like many readers on this sub we have always wanted a nice alternative solution to Reddit and so we set out to make an open source, self-hosted solution in Rust that is both lightweight and easy to configure/deploy and also customizable. Hence the project that we dubbed “Tinyboards” came into being.

The back-end is written completely in Rust with a GraphQL API, and the frontend is written in a more modern framework with Vue and Typescript and despite being rough around the edges still I feel like it has come a long way.

It’s still in Alpha, but some key features that are available right now are:

Creating/moderating boards (think subforums/subreddits)

Posting/commenting/voting

Custom emojis that are configurable on a site-wide or per-board basis

Self-hosted media (optional configuration for 3rd party storage solutions such as s3 services, azure, GCS, etc)

User/Post Flairs (board moderators and admins can create editable templates or uneditable flairs)

“Threads” posts vs “Feed” posts (Threads posts = forum-style posts/comments, Feeds = link aggregator style posts/comments)

If you enjoy running your own stuff and don’t mind a work-in-progress feel free to check it out at: https://github.com/tinyboard/tinyboards

There’s an invite to the project Discord on the readme in case you want to come chat with us, also it is open source so I would absolutely love any feedback or if anyone would want to help contribute as well.

Feedback means a lot—bug reports, ideas, even “this is cool but needs ___” comments help me figure out what to tackle next.

Thanks for reading, and I hope this is useful for someone out there.

p.s. I have a live test instance setup at https://upthetree.club if you want to peek at the UI, I have it closed to new users at the moment but you can navigate around at least