Survived the Hacker News "Hug of Death" with a brutalist Next.js app
Today was wild. I launched Blohem (Digital Noise Archive) as a reaction to the "metric anxiety" of modern social media.
The concept is simple but risky: No likes, no follower counts, no filters. Just raw text and images ("witness records") that get pushed down by gravity over time.
🚀 The Milestone:
We hit the front page of Hacker News today.
🛠️ The Stack vs. The Traffic:
I'm running this on a modest Azure setup with Docker. I was terrified the server would melt under the "Hug of Death," but our throttling algorithms held up perfectly.
We even managed to deploy a client-side NSFW filter (`nsfwjs`) during the traffic spike to keep the chaos somewhat clean without killing the server CPU.
👀 What happened?
The "Digital Void" is alive. People are posting deep confessions, random thoughts, and yes... some anime girls. It proved that people still want to share even without the dopamine hit of a "Like" button.
I'd love for you to break it (or contribute to the noise):
