GoKawiilSometimes the most irrelevant piece of a project becomes its absolute protagonist.
My blog has a small social widget floating on one side. You can see it on the right on desktop, on the left on mobile. It tells you how many people are reading the site in real time, and it lets you drop a short message for everyone else who is present to see. It is very basic. There is no history, and you do not need to create an account or a profile. A message appears and a few seconds later it is gone. It is an ornament, a wink, the kind of detail you add on a Friday afternoon and expect nothing from. To my surprise, it was used against me to discredit me and to censor an article.
Let me put you in context. I wrote an article on why I don't recommend Tailwind CSS and shared it on Hacker News. Within minutes, the text box filled with offensive and provocative messages, some even trying to impersonate me.
How it works
I barely had to do anything, and the dirty work was done by the site's architecture.
My site is an SPA that renders the HTML on the server and sends it to the browser over WebSockets (I use Django LiveView, my own framework). When you work this way, knowing how many people are connected in real time comes for free. Each visitor keeps an open connection, so I just have a table with the live connections. When someone joins or leaves, I broadcast the new number to everyone present and the counter updates on its own.
From there, adding an input and relaying what someone writes to everyone else is a small step. The same channel I already use for the counter serves me for the message.
I gave it the classic limits, nothing overly sophisticated:
A maximum number of characters per message.
The text disappears from the screen after a few seconds.
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