Fanfics on AtProto

Links:

• Background
• Infrastructure
  • Notes
  • Structure
• Contributing
• Support

Warning

This is alpha software, there's no guarantee that this will work on your system. But if you'd like to try hacking at this, take a look at the Contributing section once instructions are written up.

Background

This was an idea that sparked off a great discussion around decentralizing archives for fanfics and fan works. What if we could have archives that:

1. ... are censorship resistant,
2. ... are easy (and CHEAP) to host,
3. ... are easy to configure and extend,
4. ... have moderation tools built-in,
5. ... give users on both sides (authors AND readers) more ownership over their data,
6. ... AND have a cool sixth thing here!

I'm setting out to explore these questions by building a prototype of a fanfic archive on Astro and AtProto.

Infrastructure

Notes

AtProto, to my understanding, is made of multiple layers. There's:

1. The client (the actual site that displays data)
2. The PDS (the server that stores user's data)
3. The AppView (the thing that grabs only relevant data and serves as an API)
4. The Lexicon (the blueprint for data to be used in AppViews and clients)

... And probably more, and there's a lot of discussion around how user data ownership / censorship / etc gets handled on those layers.

In our case, we'll only worry about making the client and then get drafts of the lexicons from the community later.

Currently, I'm using these technologies:

• Astro
• Drizzle ORM (via Astro DB)
  • Turso (LibSQL under the hood)
• Unstorage (via @fujocoded/authproto)

Mainly because: 1, Astro is a really well-documented web framework that's pretty approachable as someone who used to handwrite HTML pages; 2, SQLite / LibSQL are (to my knowledge) fairly cheap databases to run; and 3, Unstorage is pretty dead simple for setting up auth sessions from scratch.

Structure

Database: db

This holds all the relevant database code. This also contains the structure and types for database tables.

Actions: src/actions

These hold actions that run every time a user wants to publish a new work or signs up for the archive. Basically the backend functionality for this project.

Assets: src/assets

This has images / libre font / .css files to be used stylistically throughout the site.

Styles (AKA, abomination)

This is the most messed up design system but I sure tried my best with it. The base style uses daisyui and UnoCSS, which means the configurations are Strange(tm). Beware of uno.config.ts, please don't poke it too hard unless you know what you're doing.

This uses CSS layers to make things work. Any styles used in base.css will overwrite everything else across the entire site. This should only be modified sparingly.

All styling should be within components or pages via HTML classes or within scoped <style> blocks. There are various colors and sizes to keep track of - at some point, I'll document them.

To make contribute new themes, check out the examples inside the src/assets/styles/themes folder. You can use the daisyui Theme Generator to quickly build a theme!

Components: src/components

These hold components that are reused throughout src/pages. Like PHP includes but in HTML and JavaScript (well, technically it's JSX).

Pages: src/pages

These are the actual routes that are available to end-users. Under the pages are nested pages grouped under folders, namely:

Users: src/pages/users

These are pages where users can view all user profiles, find a specific user profile, or update their account settings.

Works: src/pages/works

These only hold pages that are relevant to adding, editing, deleting, or viewing works.

Contributing

The instructions may change in the future in case the development workflow changes. Please feel free to report an issue if you come across any during development or building.

Prerequisites

• Git
• Node.js
  • v18.20.8 or v20.3.0, v22.0.0 or higher. (v19 and v21 are not supported.)
• npm or similar package manager

Important

Running this with deno does not work. You'll get an "Unsupported key curve for this operation" error when running the project and testing OAuth. See this issue.

Instructions

1. Clone the repo to your system using the following command:

git clone https://github.com/haetae-bit/fanfic-atproto

2. Use whatever runtime you use to install packages:

npm install

3. To run the development server, use this command:

npm run dev

Note

If you are not using pnpm, delete the pnpm-lock.yaml and pnpm-workspace.yaml files before installing packages, or there will be conflicts and your config files will not work correctly

Support

If you want to support me making making this, please feel free to donate a coffee.