Mall World is a community archive for the places that shouldn't exist but everyone keeps describing the same way — the impossible mall, the endless pool complex, the staircase that goes nowhere and somehow keeps going. The project started as a "wait, you've been there too?" thread and grew into a structured archive: themed sub-worlds, image galleries, dream journals, and a slow-building shared map of geography that exists only because enough independent dreamers keep stumbling into it.

How the site is organized

• Sub-worlds — each impossible place gets its own section: Mall World, Pool World, Staircase World, plus utility sections (Meta, News, Off-Topic). Each is a self-contained image board + thread space with its own moderators.
• Dream journals — long-form posts where users record what they remember. Cross-linked when descriptions match, so independent witnesses to the same location surface together.
• Shared mapping — collaborative tagging of locations within each sub-world. Two people who stumbled into the same broken food court can find each other and stitch the corner of the map between them.

Tech choices

Server is PHP 8.3 on MariaDB 10.11 behind Apache, no framework — vanilla request routing, plain SQL, plain HTML templating. Frontend is vanilla JavaScript with CSS custom properties; Lucide for icons, Inter and Space Grotesk for type. Auth is passkey-first via WebAuthn / FIDO2 — no passwords to lose, no resets to engineer. The whole site runs on a single Ubuntu 24.04 box.

Why this exists

The shared-dream phenomenon is a real, weird thing — Reddit threads, podcast episodes, the "Backrooms" lineage. Most of that lives in fragmented social posts that get buried within a week. Mall World is the attempt to give it an archive that survives — structured enough to be searched, loose enough that weird new sub-worlds can be added the moment someone realises they're in one. Whether you treat the whole thing as folklore, psychology, or sincere reportage, the dataset is interesting on every reading.