The UX looks slick, and I think a more realtime real-time forum is a pretty novel idea.

The only problem is that Redis is an in-memory database, and for a forum like mine, where I want to be able to keep all of the posts, that simply will not work.

If all you're doing is a key value store then check out ueberDB which will give you a ton of database options out of the box. https://github.com/Pita/ueberDB