Open source is being DDoSed by AI slop and GitHub is making it worse

I've been following the AI slop problem closely and it seems like it's getting worse, not better.

**The situation:**

* Daniel Stenberg (curl) said the project is "effectively being DDoSed" by AI-generated bug reports. About 20% of submissions in 2025 were AI slop. At one point, volume spiked to 8x the usual rate. He's now considering whether to shut down their bug bounty program entirely.
* OCaml maintainers rejected a 13,000-line AI-generated PR. Their reasoning: reviewing AI code is *more* taxing than human code, and mass low-effort PRs "create a real risk of bringing the Pull-Request system to a halt."
* Anthony Fu (Vue ecosystem) and others have posted about being flooded with PRs from people who feed "help wanted" issues directly to AI agents, then loop through review comments like drones without understanding the code.
* GitHub is making this worse by integrating Copilot into issue/PR creation — and you can't block it or even tell which submissions came from Copilot.

**The pattern:**

People (often students padding resumes, or bounty hunters) use AI to mass-generate PRs and bug reports. The output looks plausible at first glance but falls apart under review. Maintainers — mostly unpaid volunteers — waste hours triaging garbage.

Some are comparing this to Hacktoberfest 2020 ("Shitoberfest"), except now it's year-round and the barrier is even lower.

**What I'm wondering:**

Is anyone building tools to help with this? Not "AI detection" (that's a losing game), but something like:

* Automated triage that checks if a PR actually runs, addresses the issue, or references nonexistent functions
* Cross-project contributor reputation — so maintainers can see "this person has mass-submitted 47 PRs across 30 repos with a 3% merge rate" vs "12 merged PRs, avg 1.5 review cycles"
* Better signals than just "number of contributions"

The data for reputation is already in the GitHub API (PR outcomes, review cycles, etc). Seems like someone should be building this.

**For maintainers here:** What would actually help you? What signals do you look at when triaging a PR from an unknown contributor?

https://redd.it/1q3f89b
@r_opensource

Best self-hosted bookmark manager?

Looking for **self-hosted bookmark managers** that are:

* Minimal and nice to look at
* Fast & easy to save links
* Good for organizing/tagging

Prefer something close to MyMind’s design/feel. Open-source or free to self-host is ideal.

https://redd.it/1q3gi3h
@r_opensource

OSS for dumping entire camera roll

Hi all.

So I’m an iPhone normie and am sick to bloody DEATH of how annoying it is to manually (not on the cloud) copy media from camera roll to a local hard drive. There are paid shithole grey market software for this (looking at you, iMazing) but holy shit it really cannot be that complicated—

TDLR: is there a GOOD, known oss/noscript(that a total coding normie can figure out) that can dump an iPhone’s entire camera roll with full quality?

I hope this makes sense. I would really appreciate any recommendations.

https://redd.it/1q3htxk
@r_opensource

Debugging open source issues is harder than writing the code

Issue reports come incomplete. reproduction steps are vague.
by the time you understand the problem, someone else has forked.

i’ve been experimenting with feeding issue logs and test failures into debugging tools to speed up triage. kodezi has been useful for mapping failures back to commits when context is thin.

maintainers already donate time. debugging shouldn’t drain more of it.

how are other maintainers handling this load?

https://redd.it/1q3k72w
@r_opensource

fdir: Command-line utility to list, filter, and sort files in a directory
https://github.com/VG-dev1/fdir

https://redd.it/1q3kjpe
@r_opensource

Good text-to-speech software that sounds natural and with download option?

thank you

https://redd.it/1q3ld4k
@r_opensource

BYOB self-hosting vs fully on-premise

Curious what people think about open-source projects that are not necessarily on-premise deployable but tightly coupled to a specific cloud provider.

Personally, I am currently working on a project that uses SST to deploy gracefully to AWS. It's fully open-source, but I get that a lot of people here on Reddit look down on this as it's not "fully" self-hostable as they still don't own the hardware.

Mostly trying to understand expectations before I commit harder to this architecture - I am aware that I can substitute most of what AWS provides with containterizable tools (Minio instead of S3, Redis/BullMQ instead of SQS...)

Would love to hear how others think about this, especially maintainers of open-source/self-hosted tools.

https://redd.it/1q3foyl
@r_opensource

I built a customizable widget library(shadcn inspired) for flutter with live playground (Feedback Appreciated!)

Hi, I built a component library of sorts (with web preview) that lets you customize and export Flutter UI components with real-time theme changes along with the UI components themselves (lib) kinda like tweakcn+shadcn. Zero dependencies, Flutter 3.0.0+, integration-friendly, and great for quick builds/hackathons. It has over 12+theme presets including ones of popular apps!(do recommend any cool theme ideas, will try to add)

designing UI is extremely intuitive do try out!
Repo: https://github.com/TejasS1233/flutter-studio

would appreciate feedback/suggestions


https://redd.it/1q3ol07
@r_opensource

Unique features of C++ DataFrame (2)
https://github.com/hosseinmoein/DataFrame

https://redd.it/1q3ry3l
@r_opensource

Pinterest and Cosmos

I found an alternative to Pinterest - its called cosmos, it doesnt have ai slop and ads,, but is it open source? Does it spy on my data? I cant find it anywhere so i dont know its pretty new

https://redd.it/1q3slfz
@r_opensource

BlackScreen: turn all your screens black

Hi all,


BlackScreen is my new open source program for PC that turns all your screens black until you click to exit.

It is available as Python noscript and also as Rust program. Ready-to-use binary compatible with Windows 10 and 11 (64-bit) is attached to the release.


You can find it at https://github.com/Messina-Agata/BlackScreen :)

https://redd.it/1q3ug8h
@r_opensource

I built an open-source IDE and framework for Android apps development in Swift
http://docs.swifdroid.com/app/

https://redd.it/1q3wt4s
@r_opensource

I Built a Weather App Using React Native & TypeScript
https://youtu.be/Lj7ITw_tCFc?si=rPAYh9535JJieoxA

https://redd.it/1q3yblr
@r_opensource

we are building an OpenSource Youtube Alternative | Booster

https://www.boostervideos.net/about

We’re two brothers who decided to build a new video platform from scratch. We’ve been working on this project, called Booster, for about two months now.

The idea came from our own frustration with existing video platforms. With Booster, we’re trying to improve the experience by using voluntary ads that give rewards to users, allowing them to boost and support their favorite channels and friends directly, and avoid content made with AI and Vertical Short Form videos.

The theme you see right now in the screen is now available for free to every user who logs in and creates a new account. We would like to know from webdevs, how we can improve it and make it better, and also know if there is any bugs or something you would llike to point out.

Regarding costs, we've solved the high costs of infrastructure thanks to our provider, so it doesn't pose a big expense, thanks to their encoding and CDN.

Regarding revenue, monetization currently would come from a virtual currency called XP, which users can either earn for free by watching voluntary feature videos or purchase. XP is used to boost channels and buy personalization assets. We also plan to implement voluntary, rewarded ads that give users free XP. The goal is to test whether users and creators actually like and adopt this model.

Moderation is made through community votes, which are a way of letting the users and the common viewer decide if the report of a specific user was accurate or not.

In the link, we've included the about page, which includes how Booster works, plus the Discord and the open GitHub.

https://redd.it/1q3zt1t
@r_opensource

Tiny PHP pretty-printer that formats arrays like PyTorch tensors

I’ve released a small helper for anyone working with PHP + data-heavy code (ML experiments, debugging, logs, educational projects, etc.).

PrettyPrint is a zero-dependency callable pretty-printer for PHP arrays with clean, Python-style formatting. It supports aligned 2D tables, PyTorch-like tensor views, summarization (head/tail rows & columns), and works both in CLI and web contexts.

Install:

composer require apphp/pretty-print

Examples:

Aligned 2D table:

pprint(1, 23, 456, 12, 3, 45);
// [ 1, 23, 456,
// 12, 3, 45]

PyTorch-style 2D output:

pprint($matrix);
// tensor(
// [ 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,
// 6, 7, 8, 9, 10,
// 11, 12, 13, 14, 15
// ])

Summaries for big matrices:

pprint($m, headRows: 2, tailRows: 1, headCols: 2, tailCols: 2);

3D tensors with ellipsis:

pprint($tensor3d, headB: 1, tailB: 1);
// tensor(
// [ 1, 2, ..., 4, 5,
// 6, 7, ..., 9, 10,
// ...,
// 21, 22, ..., 24, 25
// ])

Also supports labels, precision, start/end strings, and even acts as a callable object:

$pp = new PrettyPrint();
$pp('Hello', 42);
// Hello 42

You may find much more configuration features in repo: *https://github.com/apphp/pretty-print*

If you often stare at messy print_r() dumps to print arrays, this might make your day slightly better 😄

https://redd.it/1q40sko
@r_opensource

First OSS project: URL redirect service – what features would make you use it?

As my first contribution to the open-source community, I built a tiny URL redirect service that runs on Cloudflare Workers or a VPS (Node/Bun/Docker).

Repo: https://github.com/dima6312/gr8hopper​

I’m curious: what would make you actually use something like this?
E.g. “I’d use it if it had X” (metrics, A/B testing, webhooks, multi-tenant, whatever).

If any of those “X” ideas sound fun, I’d love contributors – issues, discussions, and PRs are all very welcome. I had a very specific use case to solve, which the tool does in 100%, but it could do much more!

https://redd.it/1q41u5d
@r_opensource

pg-status — a lightweight microservice for checking PostgreSQL host status

**Hi!** I’d like to introduce my new project — [**pg-status**](https://github.com/krylosov-aa/pg-status).

It’s a lightweight, high-performance microservice designed to determine the status of PostgreSQL hosts. Its main goal is to help your backend identify a live master and a sufficiently up-to-date synchronous replica.

# Key features

* Very easy to deploy as a sidecar and integrate with your existing PostgreSQL setup
* Identifies the master and synchronous replicas, and assists with failover
* Helps balance load between hosts

If you find this project useful, I’d really appreciate your support — a [star on GitHub ](https://github.com/krylosov-aa/pg-status) would mean a lot!

But first, let’s talk about the problem **pg-status** is built to solve.

# PostgreSQL on multiple hosts

To improve the resilience and scalability of a PostgreSQL database, it’s common to run multiple hosts using the classic master–replica setup. There’s one **master** host that accepts writes, and one or more **replicas** that receive changes from the master via physical or logical replication.

Everything works great in theory — but there are a few important details to consider:

* Any host can fail
* A replica may need to take over as the master (failover)
* A replica can significantly lag behind the master

From the perspective of a backend application connecting to these databases, this introduces several practical challenges:

* How to determine which host is currently the live master
* How to identify which replicas are available
* How to measure replica lag to decide whether it’s suitable for reads
* How to switch the client connection pool (or otherwise handle reconnection) after failover
* How to distribute load effectively among hosts

There are already various approaches to solving these problems — each with its own pros and cons. Here are a few of the common methods I’ve encountered:

# Via DNS

In this approach, specific hostnames point to the master and replica instances. Essentially, there’s no built-in master failover handling, and it doesn’t help determine the replica status — you have to query it manually via SQL.

It’s possible to add an external service that detects host states and updates the DNS records accordingly, but there are a few drawbacks:

* DNS updates can take several seconds — or even tens of seconds — which can be critical
* DNS might automatically switch to read-only mode

Overall, this solution *does* work, and `pg-status` can actually serve as such a service for host state detection.

Also, as far as I know, many PostgreSQL cloud providers rely on this exact mechanism.

# Multihost in libpq

With this method, the client driver (libpq) can locate the first available host from a given list that matches the desired role (master or replica). However, it doesn’t provide any built-in load balancing.

A change in the master is detected only after an actual SQL query fails — at which point the connection crashes, and the client cycles through the hosts list again upon reconnection.

# Proxy

You can set up a proxy that supports on-the-fly configuration updates. In that case, you’ll also need some component responsible for notifying the proxy when it should switch to a different host.

This is generally a solid approach, but it still depends on an external mechanism that monitors PostgreSQL host states and communicates those changes to the proxy. `pg-status` fits perfectly for this purpose — it can serve as that mechanism.

Alternatively, you can use **pgpool-II**, which is specifically designed for such scenarios. It not only determines which host to route traffic to but can even perform automatic failover itself. The main downside, however, is that it can be complex to deploy and configure.

# CloudNativePG

As far as I know, CloudNativePG already provides all this functionality out of the box. The main considerations here are deployment complexity and the requirement to run within a Kubernetes environment.



# My solution - pg-status

At

my workplace, we use a PostgreSQL cloud provider that offers a built-in failover mechanism and lets us connect to the master via DNS. However, I wanted to avoid situations where DNS updates take too long to reflect the new master.

I also wanted more control — not just connecting to the master, but also balancing read load across replicas and understanding how far each replica lags behind the master. At the same time, I didn’t want to complicate the system architecture with a shared proxy that could become a single point of failure.

In the end, the ideal solution turned out to be a tiny sidecar service running next to the backend. This sidecar takes responsibility for selecting the appropriate host. On the backend side, I maintain a client connection pool and, before issuing a connection, I check the current host status and immediately reconnect to the right one if needed.

The sidecar approach brings some extra benefits:

* A sidecar failure affects only the single instance it’s attached to, not the entire system.
* PostgreSQL availability is measured relative to the local instance — meaning the health check can automatically report that this instance shouldn't receive traffic if the database is unreachable (for example, due to network isolation between data centers).

That’s how **pg-status** was born. Its job is to periodically poll PostgreSQL hosts, keep track of their current state, and expose several lightweight, fast endpoints for querying this information.

You can call **pg-status** directly from your backend on each request — for example, to make sure the master hasn’t failed over, and if it has, to reconnect automatically. Alternatively, you can use its special endpoints to select an appropriate replica for read operations based on replication lag.

For example, I have a library for Python - [context-async-sqlalchemy](https://github.com/krylosov-aa/context-async-sqlalchemy), which [has a special place](https://krylosov-aa.github.io/context-async-sqlalchemy/master_replica/), where you can user pg-status to always get to the right host.

# How to use

# Installation

You can build **pg-status** from source, install it from a `.deb` or binary package, or run it as a Docker container (lightweight Alpine-based images are available or ubuntu-based). Currently, the target architecture is **Linux amd64**, but the microservice can be compiled for other targets using **CMake** if needed.

# Usage

The service’s behavior is configured via **environment variables**. Some variables are required (for example, connection parameters for your PostgreSQL hosts), while others are optional and have default values.

You can find the full list of parameters here: [https://github.com/krylosov-aa/pg-status?tab=readme-ov-file#parameters](https://github.com/krylosov-aa/pg-status?tab=readme-ov-file#parameters)

When running, **pg-status** exposes several simple HTTP endpoints:

* `GET /master` \- returns the current master
* `GET /replica` \- returns a random replica using the round-robin algorithm
* `GET /sync_by_time` \- returns a synchronous replica based on time or the master, meaning the lag behind the master is measured in time
* `GET /sync_by_bytes` \- returns a synchronous replica based on bytes (based on the WAL LSN log) or the master, meaning the lag behind the master is measured in bytes written to the log
* `GET /sync_by_time_or_bytes` \- essentially a host from sync\_by\_time or from sync\_by\_bytes
* `GET /sync_by_time_and_bytes` \- essentially a host from sync\_by\_time and From sync\_by\_bytes
* `GET /hosts` \- returns a list of all hosts and their current status: live, master, or replica.

As you can see, **pg-status** provides a flexible API for identifying the appropriate replica to use. You can also set maximum acceptable lag thresholds (in time or bytes) via environment variables.

Almost all endpoints support two response modes:

1. Plain text (default)
2. JSON — when you include the header `Accept: application/json` For example: `{"host": "localhost"}`

**pg-status** can also work alongside a **proxy** or any

other solution responsible for handling database connections. In this setup, your backend always connects to a single proxy host (for instance, one that points to the master). The proxy itself doesn’t know the current PostgreSQL state — instead, it queries **pg-status** via its HTTP endpoints to decide when to switch to a different host.



# pg-status Implementation Details

**pg-status** is a microservice written in **C**. I chose this language for two main reasons:

* It’s extremely resource-efficient — perfect for a lightweight sidecar scenario
* I simply enjoy writing in C, and this project felt like a natural fit

The microservice consists of two core components running in two active threads:

1. PG Monitoring

The first thread is responsible for monitoring. It periodically polls all configured hosts using the **libpq** library to determine their current status. This part has an extensive list of configurable parameters, all set via environment variables:

* How often to poll hosts
* Connection timeout for each host
* Number of failed connection attempts before marking a host as dead
* Maximum acceptable replica lag (in milliseconds) considered “synchronous”
* Maximum acceptable replica lag (in bytes, based on WAL LSN) considered “synchronous”

Currently, only **physical replication** is supported.

2. HTTP Server

The second thread runs the **HTTP server**, which handles client requests and retrieves the current host status from memory. It’s implemented using [**libmicrohttpd**](https://www.gnu.org/software/libmicrohttpd/), offering great performance while keeping the footprint small.

This means your backend can safely query **pg-status** before every SQL operation without noticeable overhead.

In my testing (in a Docker container limited to 0.1 CPU and 6 MB of RAM), I achieved around **1500 RPS** with extremely low latency. You can see detailed performance metrics [here](https://github.com/krylosov-aa/pg-status?tab=readme-ov-file#performance).



# Potential Improvements

Right now, I’m happy with the functionality — **pg-status** is already used in production in my own projects. That said, some improvements I’m considering include:

* Support for **logical replication**
* Adding precise time and byte lag information directly to the JSON responses so clients can make more informed decisions

If you find the project interesting or have ideas for enhancements, feel free to open an issue on GitHub — contributions and feedback are always welcome!



# Summary

**pg-status** is a lightweight, efficient microservice designed to solve a practical problem — determining the status of PostgreSQL hosts — while being exceptionally easy to deploy and operate.

* Licensed under **MIT**
* Open source and available on GitHub: [https://github.com/krylosov-aa/pg-status](https://github.com/krylosov-aa/pg-status)
* Available as source, `.deb` binary package, or Docker container

If you like the project, I’d really appreciate your support — please ⭐ it on GitHub!

Thanks for reading!

https://redd.it/1q44hhj
@r_opensource

Reversible Debugging - Store any program state as JSON
https://youtu.be/8GpOxnFrksY

https://redd.it/1q3zd9i
@r_opensource

I built an open-source, ephemeral voice chat app (Rust + Svelte) – voca.vc

I wanted to share my first open-source project: **voca**.

It’s a simple, ephemeral voice chat application. You create a room, share the link, and chat. No accounts, no database, and no persistent logs. Once the room is empty, it's gone.

The Tech Stack:

Backend: Rust (Axum + Tokio) for the signaling server. It’s super lightweight—handling thousands of concurrent rooms with minimal resource usage.
Frontend: Svelte 5 + Tailwind for the UI.
WebRTC: Pure P2P mesh for audio (data doesn't touch my server, only signaling does).

Why I built this: I wanted a truly private and friction-free way to hop on a voice call without signing up for Discord or generating a Zoom meeting link. I also wanted to learn Rust and deep dive into WebRTC.

For Developers: I’ve published the core logic as SDKs if you want to add voice chat to your own apps:

@treyorr/voca-client (Core SDK)

@treyorr/voca-react

@treyorr/voca-svelte

Self-Hosting: Ideally, you can just use [voca.vc](https://voca.vc/) for free, but it's also designed to be self-hosted easily. The docker image is small and needs no external dependencies like Redis or Postgres. [Self-hosting docs here](https://voca.vc/docs/self-hosting).

Feedback: This is my first "real" open-source release, so I’d love you to roast my code or give feedback on the architecture!

Repo: github.com/treyorr/voca
Demo: [voca.vc](https://voca.vc/)
Docs: voca.vc/docs

Thanks!

https://redd.it/1q49n5w
@r_opensource