I recently launched Hackers Chat as an experiment to build the community site that I wish existed : public chat room based communites, pseudonymous users, transparent moderation logs, an open source code base and a site that is welcoming to non-technical users. I launched it as a single chat room for all discussions and support for user created chat rooms will be added shortly. An analogy might help : Reddit for chat rooms.

I originally launched the site under the name Bored Hackers , on the 1st of January, 2018 to an underwhelming response. The site didn’t get traction in any of the communities where I posted, yet what followed was an interesting series of events. Someone noticed that the chat room didn’t have basic anti-spam measures and posted a link to 4chan asking for help in spamming the chat room. Soon, the trolls and spammers showed up and started posting links to porn, messages about Hitler and other offensive content.

TL;DR : Code is on Github. In this post I explain how you can build a chat room using Django Channels.

A standard Django application handles http requests using a request-response lifecycle. A request is sent from the user’s browser, Django calls the relevant view which then returns a response to the user. The request-response lifecycle has certain limitations though : it’s not great for realtime applications which usually require communicating with the backend server frequently. New standards such as websockets and HTTP2 address some of these shortcomings. WebSockets is a recent communications protocol which provides full-duplex communication channels over a single TCP connection and is well suited for realtime applications. Opening and maintaining a websocket connection with a server is very cheap in terms of memory and cpu resources required. To give you some real world numbers, Chris McCord was able to hold 2 million open websocket connections on a single server with 40 cores and 128 GB of RAM. Though he used the Phoenix framework as the backend of choice instead of Django channels, the important takeaway is that websockets are extremely lightweight full-duplex communication channels.

As part of a thought experiment, I was thinking about the implications of the internet becoming mainstream in a short time frame. One of the points that came up was the lifecycle of online accounts and their associated data. The lack of a clearly defined lifecycle means that users are at the mercy of each services’ policies. Some services retain data indefinitely, some services sell user data to third parties for ad targeting and most services don’t allow deleting accounts. This is one area where the big tech companies seem reasonable : most allow deleting user accounts and the associated data, but it’s unclear what data deletion really means. What happens to the user data stored in the database backups? What happens to the data shared with third parties? Are they instructed to delete data once the upstream user deletes his account?

I finally launched Hosted Comments!

After 3 weeks of development, I finally have the first version up and running. You can scroll to the bottom of this page and see it in action.

My initial plan was to blog about the process of building Hosted Comments, but I think I am going to skip the part 1, part 2 style in favour of standalone posts talking about specific challenges of building this software.

So what’s changed since the last post?

Update : I launched Hosted Comments!

I’ll start with a little back story : I started this blog around 9 months ago and managed to build up traffic to a few hundred hits every day. It might not seem like much, but it was and still is a big deal to me. Readers used to leave comments with suggestions for improvements, questions or just to say that they enjoyed reading a particular post. Comments were powered by Disqus and all was well. One day I received an email notification from Disqus informing me that someone had left a comment on my blog. A pretty routine notification, so I opened the post and scrolled down to the comments section and noticed…six shady ads with images to accompany them. Without any warning, Disqus enabled ads on my site. Until then I never really bothered with what Disqus was doing in the background, but the ads incident made me curious. I inspected the requests that Disqus was making and it turns out that 100+ http requests, sending tracking data to 10+ external advertisers and 2MB of data transfer was required to display a comments section with 5 comments! That was my breaking point and so I promptly removed Disqus from my blog and deleted my account as well.