Our goal here was to build a platform combining a traditional forum structure with the user experience of a messaging app, hopefully finding a new market in the process.
Building a reasonable facsimile of a native app - running on everything from iOS Safari to IE11 - was frustrating and fun in equal measure. I think we've just about managed it.
Ironically, for performance we looked back to a time before the web got out of hand and "skeleton screens" became a thing. Babble is rendered server-side and the entire CSS+JS payload for a logged-in user is 71k, of which 18k is just HTML for the emoji picker.
Something else we tried to do differently is configuration. Our other platform, PlushForums (launched in 2014), purports to be simple. But it still has a vast and sometimes confusing array of settings. I set a goal for Babble of precisely zero options. In the end, we compromised on one: the ability to choose light or dark mode by default.
From an architectural standpoint, Babble is also an exercise in minimalism. Ingress is controlled by Caddy, which really is a magic bullet for a small team building a multi-tenant application where customer domains are involved.
Application servers bind a single Python (Pyston) process per core, running all background tasks on the event loop. Testing has shown this to be very efficient and I'm pleasantly surprised by the throughput. We rely on the Tornado framework throughout, which - if I was a nation state - I'd happily use to run my nuclear triad.
After 8 years of managing a large MySQL fleet, we've opted to use a managed Postgres solution this time, where we support sharding at the tenant level. Full-text search is handled by the RUM extension, negating yet more complexity.
Finally, thanks for looking and even if this isn't your cup of tea, hopefully there's value here for non-technical users and, perhaps, advanced users in a hurry!
-Adrian