I'm not sure if this is what you meant, but a blockchain doesn't require that every user runs a node. And any "blockchain" application usually involves some off-chain brokers for performance reasons, which yes users would have to trust to some extent, but they'd also be able to cross-check and switch brokers (or run their own) if they ever lose trust.

So a blockchain forum is doable in a similar way as NFTs. Would require caching on the read side, and unless your users are posting important enough stuff to warrant high xact fees, off-chain write batching.

The real obstacle is that like NFTs, it'd be solving a mostly theoretical problem. Barely anyone cares that a forum is owned by someone, and you need a ton of users to gain traction.

What you're describing is, essentially, a git repository.

HN has more restrictions on downvotes. For instance, I don't even have that button.

Reddit has restrictions on votes as well. The restrictions are not necessarily visible to you. You can click the vote button but that doesn't mean your vote is actually counted. There's "vote fuzzing" and lots of other deceptions at work.

Paywalls would be a lot more impactful to average users than anything that happened on Twitter or Reddit before.

Can they use pyspark?

I'm not surprised it's above Rust and Perl, but it's below Dart?! Ouch.

Might as well just list it as Flutter (Dart).

I cared about programming languages when I was a newcomer. Stopped caring about 10 years ago. They're just tools, each with their own gotchas and different design choices I couldn't care less about. Between two tools that both work ok, I will definitely pick whichever one my team and I can learn the easiest, and that includes LLM coverage.

So then they need to know toml (Tom's Obvious Minimal Language)? https://github.com/gtk-rs/examples/blob/master/Cargo.toml I don't know what this file says.

If only Python had the equivalent of npm.

Thought that was pdm. Never saw it used so far.

There are way more people who know Python than Scala, and it's also an easier language to get started with.

You run into the same problem with config DSLs, except now you're dealing with a DSL. Config is almost never going to be static.

True. One advantage I can imagine for a DSL is that it constrains what is possible and optimizes (syntactically) what it's supposed to be for. I think that the author of Nix justified its language that way.

The counterargument is "eventually you'll need every facility provided by a programming language, so just start with a programming language."

I'm not sure how I feel about it. The YAML templating situation in Kubernetes is a [shit show][1]. Then again, I did once cave into the temptation of writing a [lisp-like XML preprocessor][2] to make my configurations less verbose. It doesn't have any access to the environment, though, so it's not a general purpose configuration language, just a shorthand for static XML.

[1]: https://www.davidgoffredo.com/no-string-templates

[2]: https://github.com/dgoffredo/llama

What constraints are needed? I've used DSLs that are almost Python but not quite, I think because they were hermetic and deterministic. Even those ended up being produced dynamically using some higher level config DSL or just regular code. Like once you're doing RPCs, it's general programming language territory (though there are also DSLs that do this, which is cursed).

And yes, I have very bad memories of Kubernetes YAML, also YAML itself.