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Qbix
Platform
JavaScript2015–2026
Qbix / Platform

Platform

Free, open-source community platform, decentralized alternative to Big Tech. For apps that empower people and unite communities.

5Distinct people
108Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
23GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Free, open-source community platform, decentralized alternative to Big Tech. For apps that empower people and unite communities.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

Thanks, that's a great list! Might be worth mentioning our engine there too, for people who want a graph database atop SQLite and other battle-tested relational databases like…

EGreg used a recommendation phrase. 3 indexed comments match. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year108 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2015-10-15 03:50:02 UTC to 2026-09-28 13:30:18 UTC.

0510152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20152016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 8 mentions; 0 submissions, 8 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 15 mentions; 3 submissions, 12 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 12 mentions; 3 submissions, 9 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 14 mentions; 1 submissions, 13 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 17 mentions; 1 submissions, 16 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 9 mentions; 0 submissions, 9 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 16 mentions; 1 submissions, 15 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 10 mentions; 0 submissions, 10 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC808
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC15312
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC1239
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC14113
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC17116
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC909
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC16115
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC10010

What Hacker News says

108 sources
I seriously encounter this hand-wringing on HN. You are pointing out a real problem in the world. A problem that, if not solved, will keep most of the people in the world helpless and at the mercy of governments, billionaires and the platforms they control. But I don’t like to just bitch. I like to build. So then I show the free and battle tested software I built lovingly over a decade, that solves exactly this, and that I use in my own companies, but also give away for free https://github.com/Qbix/Platform What more can I do? I’m just some guy in Brooklyn, who never got funded by VCs (except Balaji’s fund) but persisted for over a decade and published nearly everything as open source for the benefit of others who might know how to deploy it. I keep sharing better and better versions over the years. What initially surprised me over the ye
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ars is that the result when I share all this for free on HN is… I get downvoted by other HNers who vehemently hate someone “self promoting” a solution to this very problem. They donmt just “not care”, they care very much that others on HN should not be exposed to such free and open source solutions Having faced the same problem (of people not running their own servers), I went ahead and built an all-in-one server that you can use to create binaries, copy them, manage public web files like in redbean, as well as php files to run inside the server, then distribute those too. Took me months of iteration with Claude. When I posted it on HN got… 3 upvotes. Then it was resurrected and reposted by the mods, got 40 upvotes, lots of snark about me having dared to use AI to build it, and “TL;DR” comments, and then… the post resurrected and reposted by the HN moderators themselves was… flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49749789 In the days since, I have improved the server a lot and v2 even lets regular PHP script kiddies build a Jack-Dorsey-style app on iOS and Android. Many people on HN will immediately have a reaction: “why PHP, it’s so old”. So I updated the github to answer that: https://github.com/Qbix/webserver Again, this is MIT licensed, and open source. On Reddit, the situation was even worse. Lots of upvotes at first, then anyone saying nice things about it got heavily downvoted and various trolls started posting snarky comments. Oh well, at least it attracted 150 stars and some people are actually forking it and using it. But let’s be real, not everyone wants to run a webserver. That’s why we had “commodity hosting” in the past. But how to make it so that people can “just use” software they can trust, without anyone being able to tamper with it? In 2017, I got enamored with Blockchain for that reason. I saw tens ofnthousands of people running nodes, and letting normies “just post” transactions. I saw a way that high-calue transactions and balances could be protected. I launched Intercoin Inc, raised half a million dollars (and more since), built the software, deployed it on 7+ EVM blockchains, and made it freely accessibls: https://intercoin.org/applications: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1733567/000173356718... Unlike most projects in 2018, we treated the fundraise like a security, and tried to do everything by the book. But, just sharing anything with the word “blockchain” in it should earn me the wrath and downvotes of a certain very active subset of HN. I feel like they almost see the word “blockchain” and insta downvote. Maybe these mechanisms are not even human? Who knows. It cost a lot of money to get right at the time, and released as free and open source. This is Hacker News. One would think they’d celebrate this, let others discover it and use it, even if they themselves don’t like web3. <— (there, I put that “keyword” in there, watch what happen to this comment now). But no. But blockchain was expensive, slow, and couldn’t hold secrets. And that brings me to… my solution in 2026, which I spent over a year designing and building with AI: https://safebots.ai/safebox.html For now HN is split between AI fans and AI lamenters (I saw this arc in web3 too). So this should get a mixed reaction. Even though Safebox isn’t even only for AI. It’s a new security primitive, like blockchain itself was. The key is this: normies don’t have to run it. You can run it, by cloning an EC2 instance, getting clients, and autonomously earning in safebux, which you can cash out on the… blockchains. Oh am I going to be downvoted now. There is nothing to configure, manage, etc. It is like running your own “commodity hosting”, except you never get to access client data, and you get paid through the decentralized system automatically, and clients get security, failover, etc. There is much more to this, and soon you’ll hear more about it. But I expect to find - not just people “not caring” - but violent opposition from a very vocal and activist subset for some reason. I mean, I build it, refine it for a decade and give it away for free, for others to serve each other and make money. If you don’t want to, that’s fine, my company will run most of the servers (like Matt Mullenweg’s Wordpress.com did). Or you will be able to run some too, by just cloning an EC2 in your account on AWS, GCP, Azure, OCI, etc. Once again, it’s not “most of the people out there”. Watch what happens right here on HN. PS: Safebots + Safebox + Safebux is coming out in a couple months. Until then, I have released Safecloud for encrypted and decentralized storage, absolutely for free, and a alightly technical person can run a backend (Jet). And literally anyone can contribute storage and earn safebux by simply opening a tab and keeping it open. Or don’t earn safebux - the default is absolutely free, for everyone. Use it for some stakeholders or users of your own websites to contribute redundant storage. Or don’t. But at least maybe upvote to let others discover it? Anyway. Here are the links: https://safebots.github.io/Safecloud/ Academic writeup: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.09870 And initial coverage by security magazines: https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2026/06/19/safecloud-browser...
In Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps (2025)
EGreg·Aug 26, 2026Recommendation phrase
Thanks, that's a great list! Might be worth mentioning our engine there too, for people who want a graph database atop SQLite and other battle-tested relational databases like MySQL, MariaDB, Postgres. My team and I built it over the years, and it's open source (AGPL). Here is how it works: https://community.qbix.com/t/qbix-streams-as-a-graph-databas... Our database abstraction layer (and optional ORM) has been battle tested in production for millions of users, and has 3 adapters: Sqlite, Postgres, MySQL/MariaDB. And recently it even added vector search for ranking results by similarity: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform/tree/main/platform/classes/... Documentation for the database layer is here: https://qbix.com/platform/guide/database PS: If you do use a relational database for storing graph data, you're going to have a lot of duplicatio
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n in some public keys. I highly recommend putting ZFS underneath, to help with deduplication. ZFS uses zstd, developed at facebook, and also can encrypt your data at rest (don't use the relational database to do the encryption, otherwise deduplication doesn't work).
In Show HN: LatticeDB – Like SQLite but for graph databases
The original source is here: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform/tree/main/platform/classes/... Yes, these days I work with AI (Claude chat, usually) to do all the "last mile" things, like packaging, writing READMEs, etc. I iterate, do quality control, and I asked it specifically to put emojis in titles. But the actual architecture, and the 10+ years of code in the framework, were hand-rolled. I just realized I can extract the web-server under an MIT license and gift it to everyone. So I put it up on github and then told HN about it. That's all! PS: I very much appreciate constructive feedback. Your suggestions have been incorporated: https://github.com/Qbix/webserver/commit/618638ecdc9097722fd...
In Standalone webserver written in pure PHP. No more need for nginx, php-fpm, etc.
If anyone is interested, you can implement something like that with a few lines of code on the front end. We expose a function that generates a uniformly-distributed hash that you can use for A/B testing and other uses: Q.Data.variant() https://github.com/Qbix/Q.js/blob/main/src/js/Q.minimal.js#L... And on the back end, you'd use it like this: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform/blob/main/platform/classes/... Essentially, this can support a huge number of "variants" and within each variant you can have N equal segments. That will help you do A/B testing and flipping features on or off.
In Cloudflare Flagship
This is really useful! How well does it compare though to Docker etc. Because I am worried about sandbox escapes. This is what we currently use to sandbox JS inside Browsers and Node (without anything extra) : https://github.com/Qbix/Platform/blob/main/platform/plugins/... I like tools like this, but they all seem to share the same underlying shape: take an arbitrary process and try to restrict it with OS primitives + some policy layer (flags, proxies, etc). That works, but it also means correctness depends heavily on configuration, i.e. you’re starting with a lot of ambient authority and trying to subtract from it enforcement ends up split across multiple layers (kernel, wrapper, proxy) An alternative model is to flip it: Instead of sandboxing arbitrary programs, run workflows in an environment where there is no general network/filesyste
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m access at all, and every external interaction has to go through explicit capabilities. In that setup, there’s nothing to "block" because the dangerous primitives aren’t exposed, execution can be deterministic/replayable, so you can actually audit behavior. Thus, secrets don’t enter the execution context, they’re only used at the boundary It feels closer to capability-based systems than traditional sandboxing. Curious how people here think about that tradeoff vs OS-level sandbox + proxy approaches.
In Show HN: Zerobox – Sandbox any command with file, network, credential controls
Serious question. We currently have this tool in our framework, that we use to play videos from youtube, vimeo, and a whole lot of other sites: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform/blob/main/platform/plugins/... We currently already use video.js, and our framework us used all over the place, so we’d be the perfect use case for you guys. How would we use video.js 10 instead, and for what? We would like to load a small video player, for videos, but which ones? Only mp4 files or can we somehow stream chunks via HTTP without setting up ridiculous streaming servers like Wowsa or Red5 in 2026?
In Show HN: I took back Video.js after 16 years and we rewrote it to be 88% smaller
I've been building a decentralized, open source platform at https://github.com/Qbix/Platform before it was cool. I don't think it's cool even now. I mostly got hate on HN every time I posted about it LOL. I think something about "decentralized" gets some people really riled up (maybe it's the association with crypto / blockchain?) but frankly, it's the ONLY solution to extreme centralization. Someone's got to build a platform with all the features of Discord, but make it decentralized and open source. I've spent over $1M and 10 years on it. I have to package it so that it's easy to install. But I'm working on something to take care of that, in the next few months, that will also include actually safe AI agents inside. It will look sort of like this: https://engageusers.ai/ecosystem.pdf I'm happy to welcome anyone aboard who takes the time
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to learn the platform, but I won't lie, it's huge. As you would expect an open source decentralized clone of Facebook / Discord to be. I just hope it's architected well enough for developers to pick it up quickly. At the very least, I think it's a lot less spaghetti than Wordpress and Joomla :) PS: In 2018 I launched something that HN hates even more... a Web3 company that released open source smart contracts at https://github.com/Intercoin . Why you ask? Because once a lot of value is at stake (whether it takes the form of money, votes, or even just community roles), it's better to have thousands of computers secure it than "just trust" the central site. When founders of famous centralized messengers criticized decentralization, I had to write this: https://community.intercoin.app/t/web3-moxie-signal-telegram... And history has proven me right... their only move is "withdrawing" from a country like Sweden. Well I guess the DSA would make them withdraw from all of Europe: https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1ixrv14/signals_ce... Don't forget, it's not just Discord. As of Jan 1, Texas is now requiring digital ID to download any app at all or visit many internet sites, and forcing Apple/Google to build it in "to protect the children" of course. And Utah is following suit soon too. The Supreme Court last year said that digital ID can be required by states.
In Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month
That could be said about compiling higher-level languages instead of rolling your own assembly and garbage collector. It's just working on a higher level. You're a lot more productive with, say, PHP than you are writing assembly. I architect of it and go through many iterations. The machine makes mistakes, when I test I have to come back and work through the issues. I often correct the machine about stuff it doesn't know, or missed due to its training. And ultimately I'm responsible for the code quality, I'm still in the loop all the time. But rather than writing everything by hand, following documentation and make a mistake, I have the machine do the code generation and edits for a lot of the code. There are still mistakes that need to be corrected until everything works, but the loop is a lot faster. For example, I was able to port our
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MySQL adapter to PostGres AND Sqlite, something that I had been putting off for years, in about 3-5 hours total, including testing and bugfixes and massive refactoring. And it's still not in the main branch because there is more testing I want to have done before it's merged: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform/tree/refactor/DbQuery/platf... Here is my first speedrun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yg6UFyIPYNY
In Tell HN: I write and ship code ~20–50x faster than I did 5 years ago
You can imagine what forms most of the the “pressure” from the government will take, on platforms owned & controlled by large corporations. Hint: it will involve their profit motive. Also it is not just in Europe — digital ID is coming in USA starting January. State by state. Thanks to the Republican-dominated supreme court, and of course it is also done in the name of protecting the children: https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/2025/07/dangerous-us-su... This “papers, please” is now happening quickly all around the world. Here we maintain the updates: https://community.qbix.com/t/the-global-war-on-end-to-end-en... This is why people will increasingly need open source alternatives, not owned by large corporations, but it needs to be far better than Mastodon and Matrix. People expect the convenience of Instagram and Telegram, and open sou
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rce will have to match it. That’s why I have spent about $1 million to quietly build https://github.com/Qbix/Platform It is time to start rolling it out. This is supposed to be the People’s Platform. Anyone who is interested to get involved, find my profile on HN and get in touch by email. Put “hacker news” in the subject, so I can find it among all the bulk email. I would love to hear from people who want to join forces and contribute to something that’s already had about $1M and 10 years of work behind it, something By the People, for the People. We are welcoming anyone who has skills, some free time, and is looking to actually do something meaningful to help liberate people from what’s coming. Whether you are a developer, want to contact journalists, or just want to promote this in a community. (And to the HN people who like to downvote this kind of stuff… just this once consider that we need to actually _cooperate_ on producing free, open-source alternatives to Big Tech, not do the weird infighting thing.)
In EU Council Approves New "Chat Control" Mandate Pushing Mass Surveillance
Wow. I go to bed and wake up to claims it hit the front page. Interesting. Here is almost the same exact sequence but with constant instructions to remain brutally honest and objective: https://chatgpt.com/share/691b4035-0ed8-800a-bee3-ae68e2a63c... I was just late at night and wanted to post this chat transcript on HN to share some perspective on what developers are getting from ChatGPT. I happen to be an expert in this particular area that I’m building. ChatGPT seems to remember that I am in New York and want “no bullshit” answers. In the last few days it keeps weaving that into most responses. That fact appears in its memory that users can access, as is the fact that it should not, under any circumstances, use emojis in code or comments, but it proceeds to do so anyway, so I am not sure how the memory gets prioritized. Here is the inte
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resting thing. As an expert in the field I do agree with ChatGPT on its statistical assessment of what I’ve built, because it took me years of refinement. I also tried it with average things and it correctly said that they’re average and unremarkable. I simply didn’t post that. What I am interested in, is how to get AI transcripts to be used as unbiased third-party “first looks” at things, such as what VCs would do for due diligence. This was just a quick thing I thought I’d get a few responses on HN about. I suspect it might have hit the front page because some people dug through the code and saw the value. But you can get all the code for free on https://github.com/Qbix/Platform . Yeah, there is obviously an element of flattery that people let go to their head. I have had ChatGPT repeatedly confirm the validity of ideas I had in fields I am NOT an expert, while pushing back on countless others. I use it as one data point and mercilessly battle-test the ideas and code by asking it to find holes in them from various angles. This particular HN submission, although done very late at night here in NYC, was an interesting mix of genuinely groundbreaking stuff and ChatGPT being able to see the main ideas at a glance, and “going wild”, while at the same time if I run it with instructions at the start of “be extremely objective”, it still approaches this same thing in the end.
In Blowing ChatGPT's mind. Is this just sycophancy? Or a realistic assessment?

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