rchan

rchan is an imageboard built on LynxChan with MongoDB, containerized with Docker. It is a self-hosted general-purpose discussion board: threaded image posts, a catalog view, board moderation tooling, and a landing page, all running as discrete containers behind an nginx front end.

The Problem

Mainstream social platforms compress conversation into feeds optimised for engagement, not for sustained, anonymous, image-led discussion. rchan exists to give that kind of discussion a home that the operator actually controls — content, moderation, and data all hosted locally rather than leased from a third party.

The Solution

rchan pairs the LynxChan engine (purpose-built for high-throughput imageboard traffic and backed by MongoDB) with a clean catalog UI: a grid of thread cards showing the OP thumbnail, excerpt, and reply/image/page metadata, plus search, deep search, and sort controls. A separate landing container and an nginx reverse proxy present the board under a single domain, while MongoDB persists threads and media.

The Work

Bringing rchan up meant containerising each piece — LynxChan, its MongoDB store, a landing page, and nginx — and wiring them together so the board is reachable, backed up, and maintainable. The result is a self-hosted imageboard where the catalog is skimmable at a glance and the whole stack deploys as Docker containers.