I believe the only other [EDIT: fully independent] deployment of the LW codebase today is the EA forum: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/
My guess is that it is massively overkill for an individual blog, and that both the level of complexity and the level of churn is not what you would want to deal with.
Have you considered either (a) blogging directly on LW or (b) modifying a simpler blogging engine to look like LW?
Most blogs have comment sections that would be much improved by LW style karma. It's also not something that can be easily gotten by a simpler engine.
Good to know, I suspect you're right, since many people posting on LW have blogs, and I'm unlikely to be the first with this idea, I assume only 2 deployments in existence means it's annoying to maintain.
Indeed, I took a closer look at the thing yesterday eve and it did seem a bit, ahem, convoluted (not necessarily a bad thing, but I assume it takes a bit of time to get an intuitive feel for it).
Thanks for the feedback
I am really glad to hear that you like the site!
Overall, my guess is for a blog where you don't expect many other contributors at the top-level, the current LW codebase is pretty overkill. I am already sad about how bloated our client-bundle is for our use-case, and my feeling is that things like our javascript execution time and bundle size and server overhead would be really overkill for a personal blog.
There will also be bugs and things will break. We got everything running pretty well for our use-case, but sometimes the EA Forum runs into different problems than we do even though their use-case is only very slightly different, and that sometimes surfaces previously undiscovered bugs. For the EA Forum we have a close collaboration that usually allows us to address these reasonably quickly, but my guess is that wouldn't be an option for you.
As a concrete example: Spammers use all kinds of different tactics to post things. We covered most of the tactics that spammers use on LW in our defenses, but sometimes spammers use different tactics on the EA Forum (like editing wiki articles instead of creating comments or posts), and then we have to quickly build something that prevents that attack vector. Similar things might happen with a personal blog.
That said, because it seems good to have this written down and because I don't know the alternatives and the tradeoffs, here are answers to all your questions:
Are the makers of LW explicitly fine and open to it being used by other people or is it open source mainly for the sake of community debugging?
Yes, we are totally fine and even happy about other people using the code!
What kind of machine (very roughly speaking) would you need to handle top volumes ~20,000 visitors/hr (say, max 3,000/min) without the core functionality breaking and ~500 visitors/hr (say, max 100/min) with top-notch user experience (assuming optimal db, distro and reverse proxy choices)
This is maybe the part where it starts seeming like a bad idea to do this for a blog. Since we have a dev team of 4-5 people, all of which could make a decent salary as full-time engineers in the Bay Area, we really didn't optimize much to bring the server costs down (though this might change with some upcoming big refactors that drastically change how we deploy the site and how it runs).
Our current AWS balance runs into about $600 a month for the main site, or something like $6k-$8k annually. This is of course fine for us to pay, given that our staff costs are much higher, but I would of course be a bit hesitant to pay this much for hosting a blog. My guess is to hit your targets, you could maybe pay half of that, so about $3-$5k annually.
How hard is it to setup the sys admin side of things ? Deploying a prod server behind an nginx with a non-sqlite db and pointing it to your own cdn
I would be happy to help you get set up with stuff. We are currently deploying with AWS beanstalk, so there is basically just a file where you plop your DB credentials, your AWS credentials and your server settings, and then press the deploy button, and then the site should go up. The codebase doesn't currently touch on any CDN stuff. Images we deliver are currently uploaded to the CKEditor CDN (the people who built our editor framework), and I would be happy to give you a subaccount on that and bill you the costs from time to time (or if the usage is under a threshold of something like $30 a month just ignore it and let you use it for free). If you wanted to have your own image CDN for images in posts and comments, you could just deactivate the CKEditor upload plugin and then use externally hosted images in posts.
How hard is it to modify the theme (e.g. fonts, color-scheme, icons) ?
The very basics of the theme (like the primary color and font) are in a single theme file and very easy to change. This will affect all the things that are different between LW and the EA Forum.
Most other things would have to be changed in React and in the JSS + SCSS itself.
How hard is it to integrate your own 3rd party service or get rid of them ? Specifically, add your own app cred for the signups and remove google analytics, intercom and all other 3rd party integrations that would make Richard stallman cry which aren't critical to the commenting experience.
This depends a lot on the specific service. Getting rid of our search service (Algolia) would probably be a big pain, since we use it it in a ton of different places around the codebase and all kinds of stuff break without it. Getting rid of Google Analytics is just a single line in a config file somewhere. Getting rid of Intercom is also just a single line, I am pretty sure. My guess is you can remove most of them pretty easily, but it might be that something turns out to be more of a pain.
What are particularly difficult/annoying/deal-breaking parts of the setup that were unexpected?
Things that you would probably currently find most annoying:
Here are some things that are currently annoying, but likely won't be issues in 1-2 months because we are in the middle of a big refactor that fixes them:
Thanks a lot for the in-depth reply.
I must agree with you that there are a lot of dealbreakers for me there. But it's interesting to see what goes into deploying & maintaining the website.
I do think that if you guys refactor it, it might be quite nice to put a "generic" version of it out there, including some instructions like these for people that want to run it. There's a lack of well-executed open source community platforms at the moment.
This one may be messy and not the most efficient or prettiest in terms of the underlying code, but the user exper...
Our current AWS balance runs into about $600 a month for the main site, or something like $6k-$8k annually. This is of course fine for us to pay, given that our staff costs are much higher, but I would of course be a bit hesitant to pay this much for hosting a blog. My guess is to hit your targets, you could maybe pay half of that, so about $3-$5k annually.
To give some perspective on what someone might expect to need for a personal blog, a minimum virtual private server (VPS) runs about five dollars a month, and can easily handle 20k qph / 2k qpm if you...
How hard is it to setup the sys admin side of things ? Deploying a prod server behind an nginx with a non-sqlite db and pointing it to your own cdn
It's pretty poor, and also in flux. We use Meteor and mup-aws-beanstalk, but are dissatisfied with them (due to slow client-side Javascript initialization, slow development-cycle build time, and extremely slow server deploy time), so I'm converting it to esbuild and a yet-to-be-chosen deploy/CI setup. So if you deploy an instance of the LW codebase today, you will probably find that the recommended deployment mechanism has changed to something else entirely different a month from now. A month from now it'll hopefully be pretty good, though!
What kind of machine (very roughly speaking) would you need to handle top volumes ~20,000 visitors/hr (say, max 3,000/min) without the core functionality breaking and ~500 visitors/hr (say, max 100/min) with top-notch user experience (assuming optimal db, distro and reverse proxy choices)
Logged-out users visiting the front page and a few post pages (ie, getting Slashdotted) will all be served from the page cache, so pretty much only limited by bandwidth. Lesswrong itself runs on a dynamically scaling pool of t2.small instances (though one would probably be enough) and a MongoDB Atlas M30 cluster.
How hard is it to modify the theme (e.g. fonts, color-scheme, icons) ?
If you're familiar with CSS/JSS, this should be pretty straightforward.
How hard is it to integrate your own 3rd party service or get rid of them ? Specifically, add your own app cred for the signups and remove google analytics, intercom and all other 3rd party integrations that would make Richard stallman cry which aren't critical to the commenting experience.
OAuth, Google Analytics, and Intercom are all already used, so integrating them is just be a matter of getting an API key and putting it into the right config setting.
Are the makers of LW explicitly fine and open to it being used by other people or is it open source mainly for the sake of community debugging?
We are explicitly fine with this. We just haven't gotten around to optimizing it much for this use case.
What are particularly difficult/annoying/deal-breaking parts of the setup that were unexpected?
Site search is powered by Algolia, which is kind of expensive and not especially good.
Site search is powered by Algolia, which is kind of expensive and not especially good.
Why not use something like https://github.com/meilisearch/meilisearch ?
I had to use it for a project (completely unrelated) and integrating it into a website is a sub-hour task, it's also silly portable since with rust you can just get a statically compiled version of packages that just need a dynamically linked libc.
https://github.com/ForumMagnum/ForumMagnum (we renamed the repo to Forum Magnum since LessWrong and EA Forum were sharing it)
I enjoy the experience of using less-wrong. I believe it's one of the best-designed websites I've ever had the pleasure of stumbling upon.
I also have a personal blog, and I've been considering revamping it. While I do enjoy coding from scratch, I've been considering using a pre-existing platform.
Using WordPress plus some themes is always an option, but I feel like this would be an overkill since the "feel" of LW so closely aligns to my own tastes.
I'm curios if anyone else is doing this (using the LW codebase for their own project, be it a blog, a discussion form, or something else), and how it's going thus far ?
More specifically, I'd be curious:
... Hopefully the question is not too out of place, it seemed to fit the form better than the repo.