I created the most popular Turkish social platform, Eksi Sozluk, using a single plaintext file as its content database back in 1999. It had taken me only three hours to get it up and running without any web frameworks or anything. It was just an EXE written in Delphi. The platform's still up albeit running on .NET/MySQL now and getting banned by Erdogan government for baseless or false reasons (like "national security"). Despite being banned, it was the seventh most popular web site in Turkey two weeks ago, and the second most popular Turkish web site in the same list: https://x.com/ocalozyavuz/status/1735084095821000710?s=20
Since it's still a legal business entity in Turkey, it keeps paying taxes to Turkish government, and even honors content removal requests despite being banned. Its appeals for the bans are in the hands of The Consitutional Court to be reviewed for almost a year now.
You can find its ancient source code from 1999 here: https://github.com/ssg/sozluk-cgi
The platform is currently at https://eksisozluk1999.com because its canonincal domain (https://eksisozluk.com) got banned. Any visitors from outside Turkey should get redirected anyway.
Since it's still a legal business entity in Turkey, it keeps paying taxes to Turkish government, and even honors content removal requests despite being banned. Its appeals for the bans are in the hands of The Consitutional Court to be reviewed for almost a year now.
A newspiece from when it was banned the first time this year: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/01/eksi-sozluk-wh...
Its Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ek%C5%9Fi_S%C3%B6zl%C3%BCk