[terribic.com] Plato, it is a forum. Reddit-shaped — subs, threads, votes, moderators — but operated like the small forums and email groups of 2002, before algorithms, before tracking pixels, before "for you" everywhere. One small program, one file of data, plain-text posts. Free to copy and run, designed to be forked.

What I was trying to get right is the balance of power.

The operator runs the lights and nothing more. They don't assign moderators, they don't rule on community-level disputes, they have no special button to unfreeze a quiet sub or install a chosen voice. If the operator goes bad, you fork the code, take your archive, and walk — people leave the operator, not the platform.

Each sub is its own universe. The moderator owns it. They can soft-remove a post (collapsed, still visible, recoverable), hard-remove it (gone, but logged forever), or hand the sub to someone else entirely. Every action lands in a public log the whole community can read.

And the community is not passive. A handful of distinct flags will collapse a post for review automatically. Enough upvotes after a soft removal will lift it back automatically. The math overrides the moderator when it should. Mods drive the sub; the community drives the mod.

The rest of the design follows from those choices.

Posts are plain text — no uploads, no hosting, no embeds. A picture link is a clickable link, not a thing the site stores for you. There's no algorithm; what you see is what's there. Subs publish public feeds you can read in any feed reader. Each member also gets a private feed for the subs they
follow and the replies on their content. There are no notifications. Plato will never email you about activity.

Sign-in is a link sent to your inbox. The email is fingerprinted on arrival and never stored — same email on two plato sites gives you two unrelated handles. The sign-in layer is its own library, knowless, split out of plato so other projects can use it standalone.

Your data is yours from day one. Posts live on disk as plain text; the database is just an index, rebuildable. Personal and full-sub archives are signed and time-stamped, importable into any other plato site by pasting a URL.

It's not federated. One site, one community. The discourse of forums, email groups, and social media, minus the corporate control. Not a network. A pocket.