Chasm.RuA hybrid of blogs and forums that shaped our community engine

Creating a bridge between blogs and forums

In 2005, we launched Chasm.Ru — a social blogging platform that quickly grew into a hybrid between blogs and forums.

At the time, traditional forums felt outdated, while blog platforms like LiveJournal buried posts too quickly. We wanted the best of both worlds.

The solution was the Tribune:

• ✍️ A blog post became the topic starter.

• 💬 Comments appeared both under the blog and in a forum-style thread.

• 🔥 The Tribune kept hot topics at the top, like a forum, while blogs continued to scroll down as usual.

• 🧩 Users could still start standalone topics, but most discussions flowed from blog posts.

• 🎥 Supported all major media formats of the time.

This made Chasm a unique platform: personal publishing + community debate, seamlessly linked together.

Features and highlights

• 👥 Advanced friending system, stronger than LiveJournal.

• 📓 Customizable individual blogs for every user.

• 📷 User-generated photo uploads and albums.

• 🎶 Later evolved into a music network with song databases, Top-100/Top-40 charts, and ratings.

• 🗂️ Introduced our first object + tag system (#acdc linked band, Bon Scott, and Angus Young).

Why it mattered

Chasm.Ru was our first real step into social networking — and also a direct response to the stagnation of forums.

By merging blogs and forums through the Tribune, we created a platform where:

• 🔗 Posts became conversations.

• 📢 Hot discussions stayed visible and alive.

• 🌐 Media, tags, and community were all interconnected.

The project laid the conceptual foundation for our community engine, which still drives our systems today.

👉 Chasm.Ru showed us how objects, tags, and hybrid interaction models could power the future of online communities — and today this remains a fundamental part of how QRaway works.