Picture

In last days of 2011 a regulation changed and I was finally able to buy ctu.re without having to live in the Reunion Island. This gave me a perfect domain hack for a service that I wanted to build to host pictures online.

I was hosting my own photoblog since 2005 until I switched to Flickr but I didn't like the direction of the service when it got bought by Yahoo. So I decided to scratch my own itch and build something between Flickr and Instagram that would be open source.

I iterated a few times over the year on the project and the latest rewrite from scratch was in 2017. I settled on Rails for pi.ctu.re but with a Node app for infra.stru.ctu.re to resize the pictures on demand and measure the network usage of each users to allow a pay-per-use model. The storage cost were much less than network cost. One controversial tech idea was to store the pictures directly in the PostgreSQL database.

If I were to rewrite the project in 2023 I'd host the pictures on Minio and resize them directly after upload.

I wanted to implement ActivityPub and connect the service to the Fediverse but it was good enough for me as it was and it never got any traction from other users. If I had succeeded with ActivityPub in 2017 I think more people would have been interested.