About
A small toolkit for people who still like the web
LinxMax is a pile of old web ideas — short URLs, webrings, guestbooks, hit counters, banner strips — rebuilt as one self-hostable thing you run yourself. No ads, no surveillance, no enterprise tier.
Why
Most URL shorteners are advertising platforms with a tracking pipeline attached. Most webring services from the 90s died, and the guestbooks and hit counters went with them. LinxMax puts them all back into something a single person can run on their own box without selling anyone out.
The whole thing is about ownership. Your short URLs live in a database on your own box, exportable to JSON whenever you want. Your webring memberships are managed by a person, not an algorithm. Your guestbook is moderated by you, and nothing shows up on it until you say so. The servers and front ends are small enough to audit in an evening.
There is no signup wall here, no email capture, and no free-tier versus enterprise dance, because there is nothing being sold. It is software that runs on one person’s hardware today, and is being packaged so it can run on yours.
What it is, and isn't
Is
- A personal URL shortener with a REST API and a CLI
- Hosted link-tree pages with per-link click counts
- A directory of hand-curated webrings
- Five paste-one-line widgets — guestbooks, hit counters, polls, status pills, banner strips
- Five small C++ servers and two React front ends you can read end to end
- Deployed by one Ansible role onto a box you own
- Your data in a database you run, exportable to JSON any time
Isn't
- A hosted service you sign up for — you run your own
- An ad-supported shortener like the big ones
- A “creator analytics” or marketing-attribution tool
- A team product with seats and permissions
- A comment system — a guestbook is page-level, not per-post threads
- An algorithm-curated social network
- Finished. It is in active development
Per component
Status
What actually works today, on the hardware it runs on. “Works” means in daily use, not demoed once.
- Short links
- Works. REST + CLI, in daily use.
- Link trees
- Works. Hosted pages, themed, per-link click counts preserved across edits.
- Webrings
- Works. Anyone can ask to join; nothing is listed until you approve it. Same spam defence as the guestbook — rate limiting, a honeypot, and a scheme allowlist on every submitted link.
- Guestbooks
- Works. Embeddable display and sign form, always moderated. Spam defence is rate limiting, a honeypot, and the fact that nothing publishes without approval.
- Hit counters
- Works. Deduped one visit per IP per day.
- Polls
- Works. One vote per IP, ever. Results stay hidden until you vote.
- Status pills
- Works.
- Banner strips
- Works. Curate a set in the admin, embed the strip.
- Public release
- In preparation. Licence and packaging first; the source follows.
Where the source will be
Not up yet — picking a licence is part of putting it up rather than something to sort out afterwards. When it lands, this page and the homepage say where.