Litestream's first release was February 2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26103776

SQLite's "buzz" isn't new, type "sqlite" into my https://tools.simonwillison.net/hacker-news-histogram tool and you'll see interest (on HN at least) has been pretty stable since 2021.

Maybe it's a local bump, but it sure seems like SQLite has become a fair more popular topic in the Rails world. I wouldn't expect to find it in a HN search tool. SQLite has gone from the little database you might use to boostrap or simplify local development to something products are shipping with in production. Functionality like solid_cable, solid_cache, and solid_queue allow SQLite to be used in more areas of Rails applications and is pitched as a way to simplify the stack.

While I don't have stats about every conference talk for the last decade, my experience has been that SQLite has been featured more in Rails conference talks. There's a new book titled "SQLite on Rails: The Workbook" that I don't think would have had an audience five years ago. And I've noticed more blog posts and more discussion in Rails-related discussion platforms. Moreover, I expect we'll see SQLite gain even more in popularity as it simplifies multi-agent development with multiple git worktrees.

My bad, I remember vaguely that fly io had a "litefs released" post but I seem to have confused timelines

Yeah LiteFS was more recent - September 2022, https://fly.io/blog/introducing-litefs/ - and the Cloud hosted version was July 2023 https://fly.io/blog/litefs-cloud/

Oh right the cloud version is what I remember - thanks for clarifying

Bit more stretched out than I thought it had been