August 13, 2026
One app, 10,000 tiny databases?!
Celld: Self-hosted, distributed Durable Objects
People love the idea, but the comments are side-eyeing the tiny database madness
TLDR: Celld is trying to let people run a popular app-building idea on their own machines and storage instead of a vendor’s platform. Commenters were split between impressed curiosity and instant suspicion, with the biggest drama over weird wording and the wild-sounding “one tiny database per object” design.
A new project called celld wants to give developers a way to run Cloudflare-style “Durable Objects” on their own gear instead of relying on a big tech platform. In plain English: it’s pitching a system where each little app “thing” keeps its own state, and if a machine dies, another one can pick it up fast by reading shared storage. The creators are basically saying, you still get the nice app model, but now the evidence, files, and recovery are in places you control.
But the real fireworks were in the comments, where people immediately zoomed past the sales pitch and into full detective mode. One reader got hung up on the line that each cell is one SQLite database, basically reacting like they’d just found out every email in Gmail had its own filing cabinet. Another commenter was even harsher, saying the homepage wording gave off “LLM-isms” — internet shorthand for text that sounds suspiciously like it was polished by an AI chatbot — and that it actually made them trust the project less. Ouch.
Then came the wonderfully blunt question that captured the whole mood: “Stored in files? On my filesystem?” It’s half confusion, half comedy, and totally the vibe. The community isn’t rejecting the idea outright — if anything, there’s real curiosity here — but the thread reads like a mix of fascination, skepticism, and people trying to figure out whether this is genius, chaos, or both.
Key Points
- •Celld uses a bucket as the coordination layer, with ownership claimed through an atomic write rather than a membership protocol, failure detector, or consensus system.
- •Each cell in celld is represented as its own SQLite database, and a built-in replicator sends state to bucket storage as LTX segments.
- •A cell’s identity is stored as a lease in the bucket, so if a node fails another node can acquire the lease and restore the cell.
- •The article says self-hosting does not automatically make the system more reliable, but it makes the failure domain explicit and inspectable.
- •The article credits Cloudflare, the Cloudflare Workers team, and Kenton Varda for the Durable Objects model that celld is designed to run on user-chosen infrastructure.