ShareReactor
A P2P online platform from the early 2000s — built, hosted and operated on self-assembled hardware, long before "web scale" had a name.
At the turn of the millennium, running a platform with millions of daily visitors meant building everything yourself: the servers, the hosting, the moderation, the community. ShareReactor was exactly that — a 25-server farm assembled by hand, kept alive by 150 volunteers, serving 2.5 million visitors a day. It ran from 2001 to 2004 and left enough of a mark to earn its own Wikipedia entry.
It was my first lesson in what became a career theme: systems that hold up under load, and organizations of people that hold up alongside them. Everything I later did at rokka and AlpineAI traces back to what this project taught me about scale, operations and community.