Author here, just adding a few more details.
What AI told me to tell you:
In today's overwhelming digital landscape, it's easy for individual thoughts and moments to get lost in the noise. I wanted to create a space where everyone has an equal opportunity to have their voice (or at least a short burst of it!) seen by a potentially massive audience, without the need for building a profile or fighting algorithms.
Flamabl.com offers a super simple premise: type in your message, and every 15 seconds, my system randomly selects one message from all currently connected users to display for everyone to see. It's part luck, part shared moment, and a whole lot of "what's next?". When your message "wins," you get a fun burst of fireworks! You can also vote on the messages you see, and each message with votes gets a permanent link with its vote history. The catch? Messages only stay in the pool while you're actively on the site, emphasizing the "now" of the experience.
Who can benefit from it? Anyone who has a fleeting thought they want to share, a quick question for the world, a link they think might be interesting, or even just wants to experience the unpredictable stream of collective consciousness. It's for the curious, the spontaneous, and those who enjoy a little bit of internet randomness. Plus, if you have something you want to promote (a new project, a cause, etc.), it's a free shot at being seen by a potentially huge audience for 15 seconds!
Why it's interesting to me:
It's websockets all the way down, providing the same message on all connected devices every 15 seconds. The server is written in C++, split into several components, so if the number of users starts to grow, I can easily roll out a few more "workernodes" to handle the websocket connections for the end users. Crucially, all the server components also use websockets for internal communication, allowing them to reside on the same server or be distributed across several. The frontend is simple React code. Everything is highly optimized so that potentially millions of users can see the same message simultaneously and vote.
