A good userbase and shared interests. Technical things matter and give a place character, but are secondary to having interesting people there to talk to.
OP have you done any webdev before or are you just spitballing? I wouldn't recommend it, it's a ridiculously fiddly process, I'd probably just play with writing toy CGI scripts for a while.
>>180702
CSS is essential for having a sane layout, let alone a nice looking website, but going without JS is pretty easy. It's a bit janky, but you can even do live updates by splitting up a page into three CGI scripts: One for sending a post/message, one for viewing an extant thread/message-log, and one just to hold the other two. The post CGI can reload without disturbing the page, and the send one can either reload on a timer or just never finish loading. I'm pretty sure that's how COMCHAT works, and it's how my website works...It's probably not a problem if I post it here, right?
https://refi-kyuru.enia.net/
**Ah. Fuck. I haven't posted here in a month.**
Also if it explodes, it's because my jewish ISP wants to charge me $10/mo to upgrade from 2GB -> 4GB of RAM (No really, they're literally HQ'd in Israel) and I was an idiot and used a VM-based language for CGI scripting so it's constantly running into memory issues.
Does anyone here have any suggestions on server providers?