August 5, 2026
Object permanence, comment chaos
Celld: Self-hosted, distributed Durable Objects
Cloudflare-style app magic escapes the walled garden — and the comments instantly split
TLDR: celld is a new open-source tool that lets people run Cloudflare-like app features on their own servers, with data stored in a bucket they control. Commenters loved the freedom but instantly argued over whether this really removes central control—or just hides it inside S3 storage.
A new open-source project called celld just dropped with a very spicy promise: run Cloudflare-style “Durable Objects” on your own machines instead of being locked to one giant tech company. In plain English, it lets apps keep lots of tiny, separate bits of data instead of shoving everything into one giant database. The project says each object gets its own little SQLite file, everything syncs through an S3-style storage bucket you control, and sleepy parts of the app can practically hibernate when nobody’s using them. For self-hosting fans, this was basically catnip.
But the real show was the comment section, where the community immediately turned this launch into a mini cage match. One camp was cheering “Finally!” and treating celld like a jailbreak for a beloved idea that was trapped inside Cloudflare. Another camp squinted hard at the sales pitch and asked the obvious gotcha: if everything depends on S3 storage to coordinate, isn’t that still your control system, just wearing a fake mustache? That sparked the thread’s biggest eye-roll debate.
And then came the practicality police. One commenter wondered if this conveniently arrived right as Cloudflare was making noise with Cloudflare OS, basically hinting at suspiciously perfect timing. Another asked the very relatable question: cool idea, but do I now need servers on multiple continents to get the same magic? The funniest energy came from the dreamers already plotting ways to run it even cheaper on spot instances. The mood was equal parts hype, skepticism, and “wait, who’s really holding the keys here?”
Key Points
- •Celld is an open-source daemon for self-hosting Cloudflare Workers and Durable Objects on user-managed machines.
- •Each object in celld is stored as its own SQLite database, replicated to an S3-compatible bucket, with nodes coordinating through that bucket.
- •Celld uses object-storage compare-and-swap so that exactly one node owns a cell at a time, without a membership protocol, failure detector, or separate consensus service.
- •State is continuously replicated to the bucket, and when a cell moves or wakes, a new owner restores the SQLite database and resumes execution.
- •Peer networking does not terminate TLS, so the article recommends private or encrypted overlays and describes HMAC-authenticated, replay-protected peer requests.