Cerca is a web forum software built to service small trust-based communities and focuses on enabling longform, longer-term discussions. It is architected to minimize maintenance and hosting costs by carefully choosing which features it supports, how they work, and which features are intentionally omitted. It features private threads, a flexible user-driven category system, an RSS feed for receiving news of forum activity, and a web interface for managing invites, adding and removing users. As a forum software, it also prioritizes transparency by logging all administrator actions in a view accessible by all forum members, and post deletion + edits are restricted solely to post authors.
Relevance to permacomputing
Cerca is built following a collapse informatics approach i.e. making the best of what we have today for a potentially more depleted tomorrow. Its development is mindful of permacomputing constraints while simultaneously weighing them against deployment, user experience, and longer-term developer interests. In general, it is a forum software that is easy to deploy (respectful resource utilisation), easy to work on (low cognitive load), and easy to maintain (few external systems and dependencies).
Limits and challenges
Being part of the Golang ecosystem, it relies mostly on Big Tech development infrastructure, and its existence is dependent on upstream changes from Alphabet/Google. While the platform owners are somewhat careful with breaking changes, their change in policies have already impacted Cerca by impacting how dependencies must be kept up to date, example.