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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.

Systems & InfrastructureCreative & MediaNetworkingCommunication & Social
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
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 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 2:59:58 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

16 sources
EGreg·Dec 30, 2025
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
EGreg·Nov 28, 2025
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
EGreg·Nov 17, 2025
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?
EGreg·Sep 9, 2025
When I started https://github.com/Qbix/Platform over a decade I go I went with PHP for most request handling and Node.js for optional realtime handling (delivering messages over websockets, delivering notifications to devices etc) And I have never regretted it. PHP powers 80% of all web sites in the world, still today! And it is the only language and runtime out there that is shared-nothing for web serving. Eliminates all kinds of leaks, including of memory, and secrets etc. PS: This was the early PHP framework that the platform grew out of: https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/s/hETCmkpWFW and this is how long ago I posted on HN about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2464112 !
In I still love PHP and JavaScript (2022)
EGreg·Jul 4, 2025
Yes, I have. I've actually built a general-purpose cache system. Several, in fact: Here's one for PHP: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform/blob/main/platform/classes/... And here is for the Web: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform/blob/dc95bd85fa386e45546b0b... I also discuss caching in the context of HTTP: https://community.qbix.com/t/caching-and-sessions/192 WRITING ABOUT CACHING AND INVALIDATION You should especially start here: https://community.qbix.com/t/qbix-websites-loading-quickly/2... And then you can read about incremental updates: https://community.qbix.com/t/streams-plugin-messages-subscri...
In Caching is an abstraction, not an optimization
EGreg·Jun 30, 2025
well, that's partially true the caller is itself a task / actor the thing is that the caller might want to rollback what they're doing based on whether the subtask was rolled back... and so on, backtracking as far as needed ideally all the side effects should be queued up and executed at the end only, after your caller has successfully heard back from all the subtasks for example... don't commit DB transactions, send out emails or post transactions onto a blockchain until you know everything went through. Exceptions mean rollback, a lot of the time. on the other hand, "after" hooks are supposed to happen after a task completes fully, and their failure shouldn't make the task rollback anything. For really frequent events, you might want to debounce, as happens for example with browser "scroll" event listeners, which can't preventDefault an
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ymore unless you set them with {passive: false}! PS: To keep things simple, consider using single-threaded applications. I especially like PHP, because it's not only single-threaded but it actually is shared-nothing. As soon as your request handling ends, the memory is released. Unlike Node.js you don't worry about leaking memory or secrets between requests. But whether you use PHP or Node.js you are essentially running on a single thread, and that means you can write code that is basically sequentially doing tasks one after the other. If you need to fan out and do a few things at a time, you can do it with Node.js's Promise.all(), while with PHP you kind of queue up a bunch of closures and then explicitly batch-execute with e.g. curl_multi_ methods. Either way ... you'll need to explicitly write your commit logic in the end, e.g. on PHP's "shutdown handler", and your database can help you isolate your transactions with COMMIT or ROLLBACK. If you organize your entire code base around dispatching events instead of calling functions, as I did, then you can easily refactor it to do things like microservices at scale by using signed HTTPS requests as a transport (so you can isolate secrets, credentials, etc.) from the web server: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform/commit/a4885f1b94cab5d83aeb...
In Asynchronous Error Handling Is Hard
EGreg·Apr 3, 2025
I remember implementing the same thing in our framework like a decade ago, but eventually taking it out. We wanted to use it for caching data between tabs, so as not to hit the server again per tab: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform/blob/main/platform/plugins/... It had the concept of a “main frame” that they would route all requests to the server through. I remember now — I did it not so much for tabs as for our solution of having tons of little iframes on a page: https://qbix.com/ecosystem
In Show HN: Offline JavaScript PubSub between browser tabs
EGreg·Feb 13, 2025
In the name of “cutting costs”, they can do anything? Divert funds to whatever they want? Explain how taking down open scientific and health data sets is “improving efficiency and transparency”. I kind of liked data.gov as a step in the RIGHT direction for government transparency! Elon never mentions those things, of course. He has a direct connection to the people, bigger than FDR’s radio which helped him bypass the media, make sweeping changes to US society at the time and get elected to four times. He used to say of his opponents: “they are united in their hatred of me, and I welcome their hatred”. The next step will be marginalize all the independent press, curtailing their access and making them irrelevant with phrases like “enemies of the people” and “you are the media now”. We don’t have to go all godwin’s law about only nazis yell
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ing “lugenpresse”. In fact, cooking up phrases to make people support unilateral decisions is the case everywhere. “Islamofascism” (didnt stick) “They hate us for our freedoms” (supported crackdowns on Muslims) “Weapons of mass destruction” (supported invasion of Iraq) “Unprovoked and Unjustified” (support war in Ukraine as unique and different than everrything that came before) “Flatten the curve” (supported lockdowns) And so on. In USA it was much milder compared to Canadan or Australia. “Vision Zero” in China was much stricter, locking down entire cities with no peep. Authoritarian governments will always come up with slogans to make it easy to support their going around checks and balances, and marginalize their in their way. Whenever you see people uncritically repeat a phrase verbatim, eg about the press, you know it’s happening. Make no mistake, “You are the media now” is such a phrase. Twitter / X is not independent media. It is owned and controlled by a small group of people, not just the algorithm that surfaces tweets to everyone, not just the retweeting by the Information Launderer in Chief, but the bots and lack of enforcement. Neither is Facebook / Meta a free platform, as Zuck admitted it also worked with the government. But at least Zuck doesn’t run an agency that gets carte blanche IN the government with our taxpayer dollars. To me the freedom of speech issue is crucial, to survive takeovers of our public discourse as a nation, so we can at least have genuine conversations about what happened and is happening, without being centrally manipulated by algorithms owned by the people in power. This is why I believed so strongly for 10 years that we need a viable free open source alternative to Facebook and Twitter, and worked on it for 12 years, even braving ridicule from some HN denizens :) I am getting ready to release it in a big way. (Obviously not just here.) See links to news articles in the README here if you want to understand what I think is the solution: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform Qbix aims to do with Web 2.0 what the HTTP protocol and Web Browser / Server did with Web 1.0 (getting people off of AOL, MSN, etc.) And this may trigger some people, but I am saying that Qbix wants to do for Free Speech vs Big Tech in Web 2.0 what Bitcoin was going to do for money vs the Big Banks in Web 3.0 . Make a platform that is decentralized, isnt owned by people who end up working closely with government to push policies down the public’s throat. (The very policies DOGE cites to justify its own sweeping mandate.) If anyone wants to get involved with building Qbix, email me or get in touch.
In DOGE staffer is trying to reroute FEMA funds
EGreg·Feb 5, 2025
It’s interesting 12 years ago I released v1.0 of the full stack open source platform for anyone to use to quickly put together pretty much anything on the Web in a standard way, and focus on actually growing it, but I have faced opposition from day 1, on weird bases First, I was told that the name of my library “conflicts with the excellent Q.js library for promises” and that no one was going to take a look. Well, promises are built into browsers now. But I renamed it to Qbix Platform back then. See for yourself LOL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6053211 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6053296 (2013) Then people told me that it doesn’t use the latest React / Angular / Web Components / Typescript whatever, and looks old. On the PHP side they told me that it looks like ancient code because it’s compatible with PHP 5.2 and to
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ld me I must break compatibility. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35897369 (2023) Then I was told that PHP is a stupid language to build a platform in and I should use Go or Rust if anyone would take it seriously. Every step of the way, I was citing massively adopted projects like Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, the number of servers running PHP and my vision for everyone to “just run it” https://qbix.com/ecosystem But the signal to noise ratio was very high. Some people here on HN started telling me that they didnt want to read that page because they found mentioned a token. But the token is optional and there only for settling micropayments and hosting companies to make money from customers globally. It is solving the payments problem on the web and getting rid of the stupid paywalls. It is solving the problem of monetizing digital content like open source software, journalism etc. Which have corrupted journalism. In short, it’s been a lonely experience. Many times people are married to the latest fads or taboos and unwilling to even read what you wrote (unless you remove all mention of a token and add the latest framework du jour). Here it is, if you want it, it’s free and open source btw: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
In I spent five years building a webapp and got my first $1 (2022)
EGreg·Jan 21, 2025
I know I’ve been posting this a few times over the past few months, but I haven’t started promoting it yet to the world. This is a hard problem because people expect real-time chat, videoconferencing, livestreaming, privacy controls, proper notifications, profiles, photo uploads and much more. I have spent over a decade building essentially an open-source Facebook that can federate in more interesting ways than Mastodon, and can support Matrix protocol and much more etc. It has all those features I mentioned out of the box, and is completely open-source. Short answer, watch this: https://qbix.com/communities Or just look at these PDFs: https://qbix.com/community.pdf https://qbix.com/alumni.pdf Longer answer, read this: https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/ We use it to serve our own local communities: Here is the code: h
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ttps://github.com/Qbix/Platform Or if you want, contact me: greg at the domain qbix.com and I can help set it up for you.
In Ask HN: Organize local communities without Facebook?

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