Storyden: Open Source Documentation & Knowledge Base

What is Storyden?

What it is

Storyden is an open-source web forum platform written in Go and released under the Mozilla Public License 2.0. It describes itself as a modern, secure and extensible platform for building communities, and takes what its README calls a fresh new take on traditional bulletin board forum software. The project lives in the Go ecosystem and ships as a container image, with documentation hosted at storyden.org. It is positioned as a community hub that combines a discussion forum, a wiki and a place to publish content, an homage to the forums of the 2000s rebuilt on modern foundations.

The concrete problem is maintenance and decay. As the README puts it, most forums are decades old, insecure, abandoned or simply not pleasant to look at. Storyden aims to solve all three by using a modern language, offering simple deployment, and providing a deliberately designed interface. It also broadens what a forum can hold: rather than only threaded discussion, the same instance can host a blog, post news, curate links, build a directory, or serve as a knowledge base for structured data. The result is a single self-hosted property that covers ground often split across a forum, a Notion workspace and a Reddit-style community.

Key capabilities

Runs threaded discussion forums through a bulletin-board model, with topics covering discussion-board, discussion-forum and forum-application.
Hosts wiki and knowledge base content alongside discussion, per the README description of a forum, wiki and community hub.
Publishes blog posts and news items from the same instance.
Curates external sites and links, and can build a directory of structured data.
Ships as a container image, ghcr.io/southclaws/storyden, that serves on port 8000.
Uses a year-based build number versioning scheme, for example v1.25.8, chosen for compatibility with package and app registries.
Documents breaking API changes in release notes and in a separate list dedicated to breaking changes.

Who uses it and how

Communities that want a self-hosted discussion board with modern security and deployment practice.
Teams running a knowledge base, using Storyden pages in place of a Notion workspace.
Operators who want a Reddit-style community without relying on a third-party platform.
Publishers and curators who need a blog, news posts, a link collection and a directory in one place.
Self-hosters deploying to a VPS, following the project's own self-hosting guide.

Getting started

Run docker run -p 8000:8000 ghcr.io/southclaws/storyden, then open

project readme (upstream, from github) — read inline

a modern community platform

Documentation | Friends

With a fresh new take on traditional bulletin board web forum software, Storyden is a modern, secure and extensible platform for building communities.

Storyden

Storyden is the platform for managing community and content, wherever they call home. Run a forum, a blog, post news, curate cool sites, build a directory, a knowledgebase and more. Learn more here.

If you'd like to help with some research, please fill in this tiny (anonymous) form: https://airtable.com/shrLY0jDp9CuXPB2X

You can try it right now! Run the image and open http://localhost:8000 in your browser:

docker run -p 8000:8000 ghcr.io/southclaws/storyden

A screenshot of a Storyden instance

Releases and versions

Storyden releases tagged versions using a simple version number which applies to the product as a whole not the API surface. For this reason, we do not use "semantic versioning" and breaking API changes are avoided as much as possible. Sometimes breaking changes may occur but these will always be documented and called out in release notes as well as in a separate list of just breaking changes.

  v1.25.8
   │ │  │
   │ │  └── Release: increments for every release in the year.
   │ └───── Year: releases happen frequently so we use a year marker for simplicity
   └─────── Major: will always be 1

This format was chosen for compatibility with package/app registries and developer expectations, but it does not follow semantic versioning, it's more of a "build number" similar to how video games are versioned.

Outside of a release commit/image, version numbers inside files and the API will be suffixed with -post to indicate you're off a stable release.

What can it do

https://www.storyden.org/docs/introduction/what-is-storyden

Storyden is a modern forum, wiki and community hub. Like the internet forums of the past, but with a fresh coat of paint and modern security, deployment and intelligence features. A discussion forum, a Notion workspace and your own Reddit platform all rolled into one. Your community can use it for discussion, sharing links or building a directory of knowledge or structured data.

It's open source, super easy to self host and an homage to the 2000s internet!

Why

https://www.storyden.org/blog/building-running-administrating-modern-forum-software

The short version is: most forums are decades old, insecure, abandoned or just not pretty. Storyden aims to solve all of that with a modern language, simple deployment and beautiful design.

Contributing

See LOCAL_DEVELOPMENT.md for local development documenation.

Contributions are very very welcome! ❤️ Until we get a proper guide set up, please open an issue if you have any questions!

Frequently asked questions

Is Storyden free to use?

Storyden is open source under the MPL-2.0 licence. There is no licence fee and no seat count — you can self-host it or, where the project offers one, pay a vendor for a managed version instead.

What does Storyden do?

Build lasting communities with modern forum technology

What is Storyden written in?

Storyden is primarily written in Go. Its source is publicly available at https://github.com/southclaws/storyden, and it has 337 GitHub stars.