With Azodu you can quickly have a feature-complete Reddit-like site that is easy to setup, highly scalable and requires no human moderation.
Go to Azodu.com to see the software in action. Learn more about the Azodu.com project in the How it works and Why I made Azodu section.
- Comments: create, reply, edit, delete, save, nested comments and link to comments
- Posts: create (text and link posts), reply, edit, delete, save
- Sorting: sort feeds by latest, top and controversial. Sorting takes place in-memory (no DB calls)
- Rich Text editing: powered by Quill
- Currency: users earn a currency for getting their content upvoted which they can use to create categories
- Categories: create, subscribe, unsubscribe
- Votes: vote on comments and posts
- Authentication: via stateless JSON web tokens
- Users: login, registration and profile pages with saved (private) content, public post and comment history
- Responsive design: works out of the box on PC, mobile and tablet
- Administration: pin posts, delete posts
- AI Moderation: posts and comments are all run though Open AI's moderation endpoint
- AI Summaries: all post content is summarized with AI
- X.com/Twitter embeds for x.com link submissions
- Thumbnails: auto-generated from links on submission
- Scalability: built in HTTP caching behind Cassandra with a highly scalable architecture
- Security: rate limiting on HTTP request and failed moderation frequency. Each time a user fails moderation, they must wait progressively more time to submit again.
By running a node as a master (node server/server.js --master) you can automatically have AI generate posts (from Reddit URLs which can be altered in fetchFromExternalAndCreatePosts) and comments. This is meant for demonstration and testing purposes only.
The two biggest points of friction for Reddit-like sites getting off the ground are 1) scalability and 2) moderation. Azodu solves both those problems straight out of the box.
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Scaling: Azodu relies on decentralized database technology with Cassandra (instead of expensive SQL solutions) and generates purely static HTML docs. The docs can be efficiently HTTP-cached (at application and CDN level) and speedily served.
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Moderation: Azodu solves moderation by relying on AI (powered by Open AI's moderation endpoint), instead of teams of moderators, to evaluate content. If you don't like AI moderation, you can replace it with human moderation or have some combination of both.
In addition, Azodu uses no arcane frameworks used on the front or backend. Everything is vanilla HTML/CSS and Javascript and written from scratch for minimal software bloat.
Instead of relying on traditional SQL tech like MySQL or Postgres, Azodu uses Apache Cassandra. Cassandra excels in handling large volumes of data across multiple data centers with minimal downtime, thanks to its decentralized, masterless architecture. This allows for continuous availability and the ability to handle enormous write and read loads by distributing data across multiple nodes. Cassandra also has the ability to scale horizontally by simply adding more nodes to the cluster without downtime making it ideal for Reddit-like sites, which may experience unpredictable spikes in user traffic.
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Traditional SQL scaling: Your DB server reaches 100% capacity so your only choice is to upgrade to better hardware or create read replicas. Both these avenues are extremely expensive. And it is the reason why Reddit-like sites can't scale without a massive investment.
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Cassandra scaling: Simply add more cassandra nodes to the cluster. You can scale to millions of DAU going completely out of pocket if you make proper use of efficient HTTP caching!
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All content is moderated by AI instead of human moderators. The creator of a community only has the ability to pin posts. They cannot ban users or delete content. The AI will check for relevancy (based on what the community creator writes in the relevancy prompt) when a post is submitted to the category and will also check for malicious content. Don't like AI moderation? Simply rip it out and replace it with human moderation.
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The UI is clean and focused, and emphasized discussion around content itself as opposed to content itself. It is closer to Old Reddit than new Reddit. New Reddit is more like Twitter and Facebook... interfaces which encourage doomscrolling and dark patterns instead of healthy online discourse. Discourse (aka the comments) is very much the emphasis.
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Users earn Azo, the platform currency for getting upvotes. They can use this currency to open new communities (which function like sub-reddits). This is to prevent a single person or group of people from reserving all the best names. If you're forking to build a Reddit-like, you can choose to remove this feature or come up with your own currency.
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All links submitted are summarized by AI so users can get the gist of what a link is before clicking it.
To configure your application, you need to create a secrets.json file in your project root. This file will store all the necessary secret keys required for various services. Below is the template for the secrets.json file:
{
"JWT_SECRET": "XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX", // The secret used for JSON web tokens, which is used for authentication
"OPENAI_API_KEY": "XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX", // If you wish to use AI moderation with OpenAI, you will need an API key
"CASSANDRA_PW": "XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX", // Used for authenticating your Node.js servers with Cassandra nodes
"RECAPTCHA_KEY": "XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX" // Google reCAPTCHA API key, which is used as spam protection on the user registration page
}Follow these steps to get the project up and running locally.
- Clone the repository
- Run
npm installin the /server directory - Install and run Cassandra on your local machine. Make sure that you have materialized views enabled in cassandra.yaml as Azodu makes extensive use of materialized views. There shouldn't be any additional Cassandra configuration required as running the app should create all necessary tables and materialized views.
- In server/server.js, set
contactPoints: ['127.0.0.1']. In production, this IP address should be swapped out with one or multiple other Cassandra nodes that are live and connected to your production cluster(s). - Run
node server/server.js. Make sure you have created a secrets.json (see above Configuration section) file before running this. - View the site at
localhostwhich you can navigate to via your browser address bar
I recommend a very simple architecture. For every node server you spin up, create an A record (with the server IP) for it at your root domain. This will force users into a round robin distribution to your servers. As your site grows, you should spin up more node and Cassandra servers based on load.
Although Azodu does have some built-in application HTTP cache in node, I also recommend putting Cloudflare in front (using the "cache everything" feature) and caching HTML docs (which translate to DB calls). This is possible to do because all pages are designed to be static and not user-specific. The JWT architecture for users and authentication makes this possible.
A very simple deployment script is written in scripts/deploy.js which pulls the latest from the repo and restarts the server. You can simply swap out the IP addresses in the servers var with your own servers. You also need to change the privateKey var to reference the file location of the SSH key for your server(s). This script assumes you have the git repo setup at opt/azodu. If you are forking the repo, you will need to swap out this repo with your own, and assure the server(s) have the appropriate git credentials. There are also several node dependencies you will need to install to execute the script, including node-ssh.
This project is licensed under the MIT License. You are free to use, modify, distribute, and sell it under the terms of the MIT License.
As a condition of using this project, you are required to include a link back to Azodu.com in the footer of any application or website using this software, with the text "Powered by Azodu." The link may be removed upon special request and approval from the Azodu team. Please contact us if you wish to discuss the removal of the link.
For more information on the licensing terms, see the LICENSE file in this repository.