plato is a forum. Reddit-shaped (subs, threads, votes, mods). Every sub is its own universe — the mod is its owner, the operator is a facilitator who runs the lights, not a referee for sub-level disputes. Every mod action lands in a public log; the community can reverse soft removals via votes; if a mod goes rogue, you fork the sub. People leave the mod, not the platform.
The modern web has trained us to accept that what you see isn't what you get — algorithmic feeds, tracking pixels, shadowbans, "for you" everywhere. plato runs upstream: what you see is what you get. Chronological feed, public modlog, posts as plain markdown on disk. The visible truth is the only truth.
What plato gives you
-
Plain text, loads anywhere. Markdown for posts, hyperlinks for everything else.
No image / video hosting; image markdown becomes a clickable link. Renders on any device, any connection, any decade.
-
Post in any language. Every Unicode script the browser can render — Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Urdu, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Cyrillic, Greek, Devanagari, Tamil, Bengali, Thai, anything. Right-to-left scripts auto-flip per paragraph; mixed-script posts render each block in its own direction. The forum's chrome (header, action pills, modlog labels) stays in plato's English voice — post any language, the UI speaks one.
-
Magic-link sign-in, no identity lock. Click an emailed link, you're in — no password, no profile, no captcha.
Email is hashed on receipt and never stored; only a one-way fingerprint scoped to this site remains.
Same email on two plato instances = two unrelated pseudonyms.
-
Public modlog, symmetric community recourse. Every mod action — soft removal, hard removal, ban, transfer — lands in /sub/<name>/modlog for everyone to see.
Members aren't passive: 3 distinct flags auto-collapse a target for review; enough upvotes after a soft removal auto-lifts it. The mod doesn't have to be convinced — the community can overrule.
-
Subs that go quiet go read-only, not zombie. No mod activity for 30 days (with a 28-day warning banner) → sub becomes read-only. Any current mod flips it back.
The operator never assigns mods or unfreezes a sub. Communities reactivate themselves or fork a successor.
Net effect: a "lawful order to install a chosen mod" has no admin path to attach to.
-
One mod dashboard, one public audit. /modlog has three modes: open (pending flags, decide inline), inbox (current state), audit (every event flat, instance-wide, public, no login).
Per-sub /sub/<name>/modlog is public too. Audit by default beats trust by default.
-
RSSvp — feeds, not notifications. The whole instance publishes /rss (public firehose, latest 50 across every sub); every sub publishes /sub/<name>/rss; each logged-in user gets two token-gated personal feeds (/u/<token>/subs.rss for subs they follow; /u/<token>/rss adds replies + mod actions on their content). The home page's one rssvp link points anonymous readers at the public firehose and logged-in readers at their personal feed.
Drop the URLs into NetNewsWire / Miniflux / FreshRSS. No app, no push, no algorithm.
Plato will never email you about activity — magic-link login is the only outbound mail, deliberately.
-
Your data is yours from day one. Posts are plain .md files on disk; the database is an index, regenerable.
Request a personal archive from /memlog (no tenure gate) or a full sub archive from /sub/<name>/manage (mod or 60-day subscriber). Both are signed .tar.gz with markdown + JSON + an Ed25519 sig + optional OpenTimestamps proof — readable with cat, verifiable with ots, no plato install required.
Sub archives import into any other plato instance via URL paste.
-
You pick the feed. Home: Posts / Comments tabs, sort by new / old / top / hot, filter by 24h / week / all.
Each sub keeps its own color so feeds are scannable.
No algorithm decides what you see — there isn't one to game.
-
Runs on a $20/year VPS. One Node process, one SQLite file, one HTTP port. No build step, no frontend framework, no clustering.
Tested on RackNerd (~$20/year KVM, port 25 + PTR via support ticket); Hetzner / OVH / Linode / Vultr also work. Backup = bundled node:sqlite snapshot + tar (no system sqlite3 needed); healthcheck = curl /healthz. Apache 2.0, fork without asking.
What plato will never do
Decisions, not roadmap items:
- Ads, analytics, tracking pixels, third-party JavaScript.
- Algorithmic feeds.
- Karma, follower counts, post counts, leaderboards, "online now" badges.
- Real names, phone numbers, photos, locations.
- Image / video / file uploads.
- Tags, hashtags.
- Private subs, DMs, hidden side-channels.
- Password auth, OAuth, SSO, federation.
Closest cousin: Lemmy
Lemmy is the open-source Reddit clone most often suggested. Same shape, different bet:
| Lemmy | plato |
|---|
| To run it | 5 services + database server, container setup | One program, one file, two commands on a cheap VPS |
| Sign in | Username + password (recovery, 2FA, CAPTCHA) | Click an emailed link, address forgotten |
| Privacy of your email | Kept on file, same identity across sites | One-way fingerprint, different pseudonym per site |
| Federation + image hosting | Yes (cross-server protocol, server caches strangers' images) | No — one site, links only |
| If the operator goes bad | Move to another federated instance | Fork the code + your archive, run your own |
This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗
