LOKA

What is Loka?

Loka is an in-progress ActivityPub powered static site generator that focuses on data portability and privacy. What sort of things are planned?

• Opt-in federation of content both at the server and user level.
• Per-post and global publication privacy settings: completely public, completely private, or certain authenticated users, user groups, and/or servers only. The settings selected for individual posts will apply retroactively to new followers only if desired.
• Federation option levels that mirror the publication settings; this will enable remote users to see content without allowing it to be copied into the remote server's database.
• User data import, export, and deletion.
• Granular options for muting and blocking other users, including 'hidden' modes where the other federated server is not made aware of the block. In this way, a user may simply 'disappear' without making it clear they have blocked the offending party.
• Extensive user customization through the use of HTML templates and user-supplied CSS files.
• Zotero and biblatex integration
• Tools for importing and exporting data from Misskey, Mastodon, WordPress, and Twitter archives.
• Mastodon API support (to start) for Loka to act as a Mastodon client: this will allow remote users to locally authorize such that they can interact with user's feeds here.
• 'Backfilling of replies': the context of a conversation should always be available and visible.

Ultimately, Loka should be performant and the goal is to enable it to easily run on low-compute-power hardware.

What is done? What exists? What is the current focus?

Currently, Loka is in the early stages: the framework for supporting various backends and the tools necessary to construct a data pipeline going to and from the backends to ActivityPub are in place! These need to be fleshed out to fully support all the database and ActivityStream primitives.

Specifically, the framework for reading from both MySQL and PostgreSQL backends is working and in place, as well as some of the schema for both WordPress and Misskey. Part of the ActivityStreams vocabulary is implemented and elements from the supported databases can be converted to ActivityStreams; in addition, incoming payloads for Actors are also properly deserialized into native Loka types.

Can I get involved?

Loka is not currently accepting pull requests or doing code reviews; however, comments on the planned feature set are absolutely wanted! "Nothing about us without us": how can one individual anticipate the needs of entire communities? If there are features you think are lacking in existing social media solutions (or if you have comments or thoughts) please file an issue.